Nathan Ballingrud’s WOUNDS is a collection of short stories and a novella about ordinary people connecting with the border of Hell. Packed with ideas, it blew my mind and warmed up this reader’s jaded horror heart.
Yes, I’ve been jaded lately as a reader, with too many books bought only to be DNF’d. (That’s a statement on me, not the general state of fiction.) So, when I was recommended Nathan Ballingrud’s WOUNDS, I was surprised to very quickly fall in love with Ballingrud’s fearless imagination, big ideas, and tantalizing and surprising mythology of Hell.
In these stories, an order of monks lives at the border of Hell, working on the nether region’s Atlas. Strange creatures overrun a city and turn the dead into a musical instrument. A bartender discovers an underground ritual that summons angels. And more…
The writing is terrific–Ballingrud knows what he’s doing–but it’s the cascading ideas, one striking and surprising image after another often confronted through the lens of ordinary people as characters caught up in the horror, that really won me over. I felt like I could read a hundred of these stories just to keep learning a little more about Ballingrud’s mythology of Hell, which had a way of filling in some detail only to add even more mystery.
Highly recommended–even for jaded horror fans.
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