Nathan Ballingrud

Ballingrud’s novel length debut is not ‘bad’, so to say, but the story failed to connect with me. I can’t fully point at what the problem was – it might have been the fictional 1930s Mars, which was obviously a fake construct – a cross between Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Western movies and a bunch of other stuff.

After some time, I started to notice it simply didn’t engage me. I didn’t care about what happened to the characters, and I wasn’t interested in the world building either. I stopped reading at 55%. It might have been the prose – somehow it seemed devoid of a soul. In all fairness, this got high praise elsewhere, amongst others from Speculiction.

I still have high hopes for Ballingrud’s short story collection North American Lake Monsters though. The short form seems better suited for his kind of fantastica – for this particular reader at least.

Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It… (mere)

File under: Like but don't love. Whatever else this novel is, it's a shout-out to Ray Bradbury and the classic Western, as an adolescent woman finds herself caught up in a failing colony on Mars that has lost contact with Earth, and goes hunting for satisfaction against those who have wrecked her life. I also suspect that this story is meant to be food for thought for what one's self would do if stuck in a situation of mass social collapse. There's nothing I can fault the book for in terms of writing, and the depiction of the main character.

What I'm less fond of is that this story is told as a quasi-memoir, which I tend not to like. Also, considering Ballingrud's previous track record as a horror writer, I perhaps expected this story to take more of a Lovecraftian turn, but events didn't turn out that way. Though the reader does get a shot of creepiness in the end, I'll admit that I found it a little slight compared to the build-up. In any case, it'll be interesting to see what Ballingrud comes up with next.… (mere)

I don't think this was bad, maybe I'd have preferred it in a different frame of mind, just none of the stories really got to me. Only a few of the stories are typically horror, although they all have horror elements. Maybe I had slightly wrong expectations. I felt like I could see all the elements and how you'd expect them to come together, but by the end I always felt unsatisfied, like a bit was missing. A few characters are so obvious you're expecting something more to give them depth, most are hard to get a read on. Like in Wild Acre, it's obvious the main character faces a "test" of his own sense of masculinity with a horror element, which he fails, but then the rest of the story doesn't really develop it much behind just saying "yep he failed a test of masculinity, meaning he's not masculine in the same way any more". I dunno, hard to tell if I'm just judging it too harshly. I just felt constantly unsatisfied and didn't feel there was much depth even though I saw the setup for it.… (mere)