North American Lake Monsters – A Skilful Mix of Supernatural and Sad Mundanity

“She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are.”

Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters is a collection of weird and powerful short stories the author has written between 2004 and 2013. One of my favorite and prestigious ‘New Weird’ author, Jeff VanderMeer has heaped praises upon Ballingrud. Moreover, this debut collection of short dark fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award. Nathan Ballingrud’s The Visible Filth, yet another acclaimed short-fiction, has already been turned into a movie, directed by British-Iranian film-maker Babak Anvari (‘Under the Shadow’). All such interesting tidbits and my predilection for dark fiction drove me towards reading these nine short-stories that explores irreparable human tragedies, laced with ambiguous supernatural elements.

Nathan Ballingrud’s stories have already gained a pivotal status among contemporary weird horror fiction, alongside the works of Victor LaValle, Helen Oyeyemi, Laird Barron, Caitlin Kiernan, and John Avidje Lindqvist. All of Ballingrud’s short fiction in North American Lake Monsters uses supernatural presence or events as a catalyst to examine the mundane lives of ‘broken’ people and their surroundings (most of the tales are set in contemporary American South). While the inscrutable supernatural elements are kept in the background, its intrusion seems to escalate the trauma of individuals in interminable ways. Ballingrud approaches this trauma in a very raw and painful manner that those expecting an escapist horror fiction would be dismayed. Monsters and fantastical beings do exist literally in Ballingrud’s universe, but the aloofness, apathy, fury, and selfishness of humans withholds greater power to terrorize us.

In the first short-story, ‘You Go Where It Takes You’, a waitressing single-mother named Toni meets a charming stranger at the diner. She takes him home and he shows to her boxes full of human skins, which the guy says he stole from a mysterious figure. In the next one titled ‘Wild Acre’, a near-bankrupt construction worker momentarily watches his co-workers getting devoured by a Werewolf-like creature. In my most favorite story in the collection, ‘The Monsters of Heaven’ (which won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for ‘Best Short Fiction’ in 2008), an estranged couple who has lost their 4-year-old boy nurtures a dying ‘angel’. The arrival of these ugly, baby-like ‘angels’ are viewed as a global phenomenon, but the primary focus lies on how this particular traumatized family react to it. In my second favorite story, ‘The Good Husband’, the husband of a woman, who has attempted suicide several times, leaves her this time to succeed. But the ‘dead’ wife wakes up next day, wondering what she ought to do now. 

The titular story isn’t about a Loch Ness monster-like creature which collides with boats. It’s simply about a guy, who has just come out of prison, vacationing together with his wife and teenage daughter at the lake. The daughter finds a dead lake monster washed up on the shore. The marital problems are foregrounded as the guy’s intense feelings of revulsion towards the creature bring out more of his worst qualities. A deadly deal with a vampire is the focus of ‘Sunbleached’, whereas the discovery of a stairwell going deep into earth (clearly not the work of humans) in the middle of Antartica is the subject of Love-craftian tale, ‘The Crevasse’. ‘S.S.’ and ‘The Wayward Station’ are the timeliest stories in the collection, the former examining the life of a poor teenager who turns out at a white supremacist meeting (on his girl-friend’s insistence), and the later revolves around a homeless man, haunted by the life he had in pre-Katrina New Orleans (also, these two stories has lesser fantastical components).

Nathan Ballingrud’s tales might disappoint readers who are expecting Stephen King or Cliver Barker-style horror fiction. By and large, the author uses the horror element as a tool to realize a challenging and grounded literary expression. The supernatural tropes in these stories are clearly metaphorical. It helps to reveal a character, and in the process the genre tropes also gets reinvigorated. Ballingrud proves that werewolves or vampires or monsters could be used to great effect, provided one rightly discerns and applies it as a metaphor. Failed masculinity or emasculation is a recurrent theme in the collection. The tension in ‘Wild Acre’ or ‘The Monsters of Heaven’ largely arises from interrogating the men’s insecurity and their strict tribalistic feelings. Other recurrent themes include broken families and haunted memories. Furthermore, the emphasis on region and setting (American South) brings lot of energy and raw power to the stories’ themes.

Nathan Ballingrud

Like any other short-story collections, North American Lake Monsters has few shortcomings. But Nathan Ballingrud must be commended for allowing his imagination as well as his attention to realism to break the boundaries laid out for writers of horror. As I mentioned earlier, the author applies horror not as a genre, but as a mode of expression. Accordingly, these tales keeps us in a state of obfuscation, denying any easy emotional catharsis. And unlike many horror fictions, Ballingrud allows great space for personal interpretation. What these stories imply may remain particular to each individual. We aren’t mere spectators in this literary world, but participants gazing at the unknowable. Overall, North American Lake Monsters is a diverse, poetic yet devastating assemblage of short fiction that looks into the darkest corners of human psyche.