North American Lake Monsters

By: Nathan Ballingrud

Narrated by: Travis Young

Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's Summary

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life.

Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves. Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, or ex-wives, and sometimes they wear the faces we see in our mirrors. The people in these stories - ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids seduced by extremism - are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they’re ruined; sometimes redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, and terrifyingly human. Even at their most monstrous.

©2013 Nathan Ballingrud (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Outstanding collection of charecter-driven horror

What did you love best about North American Lake Monsters?

If you’ve not read (or listened to) the fiction of Nathen Ballingrud, then you are missing one of the most exciting up-and-coming voices in horror and dark fiction. The range of Ballingrud’s style and interests are on display in this collection of his short works, and every one of the carefully selected stories here is thought-provoking, enigmatic and beautifully tragic. While all of the stories have elements of horror, the supernatural, or some uncanny elements, they are all character-driven, deeply humanistic, and populated with very believable and flawed people. This is not a hackneyed collection of genre pot-boilers; pretty much every story here would hold up perfectly if the supernatural elements were removed, but the fact that there are monsters, angels (maybe), demons, and other kinds of weirdness elevates each work into a kind of dreamy otherworld that oddly makes all the human emotion even more real. Many of these stories (like the Shirley Jackson Award-winning “The Monsters of Haven”) deal with thwarted masculinity, when male protagonist find themselves powerless in the face of the inexplicable. A few of the stories are set in New Orleans (where Ballingrud lived for several years), and in these tales the city itself becomes a major character, but Ballingrud avoids falling back on cliches and instead paints a picture of the city that is as nuanced and conflicted as any of his other characters. To top it all off, Travis Young provides an excellent narration; with a reedy Southern lilt that really sounds at home coming from Ballingrud’s characters. If you love dark tales populated by very real and sympathetic (though not always easy or like or heroic) characters, you owe it to yourself to get this collection.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The protagonist of "The Way Station" some on of my favorites, his loss and hopelessness were beautifully captured in the central metaphor of the story, I found myself rooting for him to find something to hold on to.

What about Travis Young’s performance did you like?

He did a great job, and he has the perfect voice for this these stories

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Peel back the surface and see the world as you always feared it to be...

Any additional comments?

Get this collection and hear an exciting new voice in horror; it will renew your faith in the potential for dark fiction to tell meaningful stories

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Great writing - lots of pain

I begin listen around 11:30 and finished the third tory by about 2:00 a.m. The writing is great; the narration is great. (Nathan has a thing for all kinds of light, stars, luminosity, as you will see). But, man, these are characters in pain. I love the stories, but they're painful, and I don't expect to listen to three in a row again.

Not for Everyone

This book of short stories to me is something special. I really enjoy the literary style of the author, his descriptions and metaphots are stirring. A lot of people will say all the stories ended just as they got interesting, but I think it's an achievement that I want a novel for each of them, yet I'm also satisfied in the mystery of what comes next. I think he really captures humanities many responses to horror, especially masculinity since they're all mostly from a male perspective.

I rated the performance poorly, but that's yet again Audibles producers or engineers fault. The bayou drawl of the narrator fits most every story and the matter of fact delivery reminds you of getting an interesting story from a stranger in some bar. There are just a bunch of weird redone lines insterted 10dbs louder and with more bass. It's jarring and takes you out of the story. I can't imagine what they had to redo was any worse than the awful solution they came up with. Audible really needs to step up their game.

A dark and realistic read.

very dark. the author
knows human hardship first hand. however endings to anticlimactic for me.

Haunting. Stays with you.

Not overtly hack and slash genre stuff but a deeper, more relatable set of dark, haunting stories. So, so solid. Listened to this collection a few times now which is something I don't recall doing very often and think I'll keep coming back to it. Just great. The audio performance fits well too. Just a solid piece of work all around. The only complaint is there isn't more stories. Mr Ballingrud has a new fan here.

disappointing

it was a hard book to get through. The stories seemed good well written and all that but every story has a poor ending. It was not at all what i expected.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Penny Dreadful

Would you try another book from Nathan Ballingrud and/or Travis Young?

Yes for the narrator; No for the author.

Would you ever listen to anything by Nathan Ballingrud again?

No.

Any additional comments?

I enjoyed the second story. However, the rest were just dreadful.

0 of 4 people found this review helpful