Cold Reading #1
My Clarion West classmate Joule Zelamn recommended Nathan Ballingrud’s short stories to me; I googled and found his story Sunbleached and while the premise (ǫpyrь, bleh) was not my favorite, it really hit hard. I immediately had to go buy his collection and I loved it. He prose style is beautiful and poetic and he writes about men in a bleakly intimate way. The men in these stories are lost or losing themselves, broken or on the precipice of breakage. Ballingrud holds the masculinity of his characters in his hand like a very delicate egg, carefully cracking away at the shell, exposing the tender and ugly innards for us. His monsters, often of the traditionally variety, range from the abject and inscrutable to viscerally terrifying in all the best basal ways.
Here’s three tasty excerpts that stuck in my head from three stories:
You can read some of the stories online: Sunbleached, North American Lake Monsters and The Monsters of Heaven. Buy the collection here!