Nathan Ballingrud

“Sunbleached”

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This week the Deep Ones discussion group over at LibraryThing tackled a Nathan Ballingrud story.

Review: “Sunbleached”, Nathan Ballingrud, 2011.North American Lake Monsters

I wasn’t pleased when, six words into this story, I found out it was a vampire tale.

Fortunately, Ballingrud gives us a real old school vampire.

Sometimes, Ballingrud reminds us, the other really is dangerous, lethally dangerous, and a menace to humanity.

The vampire stalks through today’s fiction trailing behind it centuries worth of symbolism and reeking of both the blood of the slaughterhouse and the musk of a lover’s bed.

Having a vampire show up in a story long ago stopped meaning anything consistent about what to expect. Love bites to ripped out throats, seducers to ambushers, princes to proles – the modern vampire exists not on a spectrum but in a multi-dimensional space. Even taking blood is not strictly required to be assigned to the category.

Ballingrud’s vampire claims, with the very first words of the story, its kind are “God’s beautiful creatures”. Continue reading →

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol.2

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This one got read as something of a fool’s errand to see if I could learn anything about Kathe Koja’s ideas about what constituted “weird fiction”.

Well, “the weird” means different things to different people. That’s the whole idea behind getting a guest editor for each volume of this series, now in its third installment.

Is it the best weird fiction of the year? How would I know? And if I did, there really wouldn’t be much point in me reading this.

Series editor Michael Kelly read about 2,800 stories and passed the best to Koja for the final decision on whether or not to include them.

Koja’s ideas of weird fiction and mine don’t match much. On the other hand, I have no idea what she had to work with for 2014.

Still, the book had enough good stories in it for me to recommend, and I will read other volumes in the series.

However, I read it almost four months ago, and I’m only covering the stories that stuck in my mind, weird or not. That’s why this is a . . .

Low Res Scan: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2, eds. Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly, 2015.years-best-weird-2

For me, the only weird story in the book was its oldest: Jean Muno’s “The Ghoul”. First published in 1979, it got its first English translation, from Edward Gauvin, in 2014. Beautiful in imagery, it has a man walking a foggy beach. He encounters a woman in a submerged wheelchair. The mixing of time, a jump back to 20 years earlier in the man’s life, and language that may be realistic, may be metaphorical, was beautiful and memorable.

Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Atlas of Hell” is an occult take on a hard-bitten crime story. Narrator Jack runs a bookstore in New Orleans (with the really good and profitable stuff in back). Jack’s old employer, crime boss Eugene, coerces him into another job. Jack’s to take a thug with him and find Tobias who has not only ripped off some gambling proceeds but somehow gotten, from Hell no less, the thighbone of Eugene’s dead son. It’s off to the bayou and some weird stuff, and that atlas turns out to be something unexpected.

Siobhan Caroll’s “Wendigo Nights” has a setup similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing: a canister (from the doomed Franklin Expedition, no less – Caroll has done academic work on polar exploration) is retrieved from the thawing tundra. Mayhem ensues involving the wendigo – monster or really bad cabin fever that turns men into cannibal killers depending on whether you go with folklore or psychology. Continue reading →

Lovecraft Unbound

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I’m off polishing up work for other outlets, so you get this retro review from April 26, 2010.

Out of curiosity I added up how many anthologies Ellen Datlow has done since her career started in 1981. It’s eighty-nine by my rough count. A fair number are famous titles — at least as far as anthology titles go.

Review: Lovecraft Unbound, ed. Ellen Datlow, 2009.Lovecraft Unbound

Unlike Datlow’s earlier tribute anthology, Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, where many of the stories, removed from authors’ notes and the context of the book, didn’t seem to have much to do with Edgar Poe, almost all these stories have an obvious Lovecraft connection. It usually isn’t a listing of the blasphemous tomes and extraterrestrial entities created by the master. Datlow wisely avoided that, for the most part, along with Lovecraft pastiches.

It isn’t an entirely new anthology. Four of the stories are reprints. But virtually all the stories are enjoyable and work as either modern examples of cosmic horror, horrific nihilism, or interesting takeoffs on Lovecraftian themes and premises.

The one exception is one of those reprints and, surprisingly, from the biggest name here. Possessing no discernable Lovecraftian theme, image, or plot element, Joyce Carol Oates “Commencement” also fails even in its internal logic. The plot concerns the allegorical cast of the Poet, the Educator, the Scientist, and the Dean and a fate they really should have seen coming at a future graduation ceremony. Continue reading →

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “The Crevasse”

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“The Crevasse”, Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, 2009. (With Spoilers)

This story, seemingly set in the 1920s in the Antarctic, matches not only Lovecraft’s settings (specifically, of course, his “At the Mountains of Madness”), but his mood and themes.

A team of four men has separated from an expedition and, with one of them injured, is making its way back to a base camp.  A dog falls in a crevasse but doesn’t die right away.  After listening to its whimpering for hours, the protagonist, a doctor in World War One, goes into the crevasse to put it out of its misery  In the shadows at the bottom, he thinks he sees something move and evidence of a stairway leading down.

He is not believed by a companion who also goes into the crevasse, but it is fairly clear the companion doesn’t want to believe in what he saw or its implications.  A nice, effective – in plot and setting – working of a Lovecraft theme.

The crevasse is a Nietzschean abyss one should not gaze into, a literalized metaphor for the abyss the doctor feels from the war and death of his wife, a chasm beckoning self-annihilation.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: No.
  • On-Stage War: No.
  • Belligerent Area: No.
  • Home Front: No.
  • Veteran: No.

World War One mainly serves to explain the psychological state of the protagonist, his vulnerability to revelations of cosmic horror in the wake of exposure to world horrors.

There is, incidentally, a close link to Antarctic exploration and World War One. Photographer Frank Hurley took photos of the famed Shackleton expedition and the war. Indeed, the Shackleton expedition left Portsmouth Harbor shortly after England entered the war.

 

World War One in Fantastic Fiction.