Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell
By Nathan Ballingrud
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: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six 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 is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he‚ got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing." - Victor LaValle, award-winning author of The Changeling
"Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back." - Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts
"In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field's most accomplished short story writers." - The Washington Post
"One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year." - The New York Review of Books
"Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory." - Hellnotes
"Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year." - New York Journal
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 offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.