Ballingrud Bundle

“Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty."
—The New York Times

"In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.”
—The Washington Post

North American Lake Monsters

Nathan Ballingrud’s award winning debut collection is a cornerstone of contemporary horror fiction that dismantles the boundaries around genre fiction. Shattering and luminous, North American Lake Monsters explores the darker parts of the human psyche to reveal monsters, real and imagined, external and internal. They are us and we are them. What is revealed in these stories is a working class portrait of 21st century American life that is as cruel as it is fragile and as precarious as it is tenacious.

These are love stories and monster stories. Monsters who wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The people in these stories are driven to extremes by love and by desperation. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to escape.

The Atlas of Hell

In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined:

Now, in The Atlas of Hell, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in ‘The Visible Filth’ to the search for the map of hell in ‘The Butcher’s Table’, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on off shore oil rigs. His story ‘The Monsters of Heaven’ won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.