BOOK POST | THE ATLAS OF HELL | 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:

“What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition”
Los Angeles Review of Books.

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.

REVIEW

Published by Dead Ink books, The Atlas of Hell is a reworking of Nathan Ballingrud’s second US collection, Wounds: Six Stories from The Border of Hell.

The Atlas of Hell is an astoundingly imaginative piece of horror fiction that weaves its inventive spell through the six stories and the interconnecting vignettes.

Ballingrud has a brilliant imagination, and his stories are highly original in their content. His stories are full of dark fantasy and horror and at times can be quite disturbing in their imagery and have an exquisite surrealness to them, much like his latest novella, The Crypt of the Moon Spider.

There are many standouts in this collection. The first, The Atlas of Hell has an almost Keith Rosson quality to it, mixing hard boiled crime with the fantastical and supernatural. However, the collection then moves into weirder territory as we meet Allison in The Diabolist, who after losing her father, a noted Diabolist, finds a strange creature in the cellar of her house.

For those that don’t know Ballingrud’s work, his short story, The Visible Filth was made into a film called Wounds. The story takes place in a bar in Orleans, where after a fight in the bar, a bartender discovers a phone that has been left by the group of brawlers. He then starts to receive disturbing images and messages on the phone. In this story, Ballingrud masterfully creates a mounting feeling of dread that leads to a shocking conclusion.  

Each of the stories in this collection is utterly beguiling in their weirdness. In interviews, Ballingrud has stated that besides the other plethora of influences on him, Clive Barker was a transformative force in his look on horror, and this is quite recognisable in his writing, However, it is not just the imagery of Barker that he has embraced, but is also the punk ethic of Barker’s early writing that pushed the boundaries of horror and gave seasoned horror readers something new.

The Atlas of Hell is a fantastic collection of stories that will keep readers, both old and new coming back for more.