News & Blog

In the “better late than never” department, The Urban Politico has published a glowing new review of Die and Stay Dead. Here’s a snippet:

This story is just crying out to be translated into the visual medium. I’m imagining something that draws on Big Trouble in Little China, Angel Heart and National Treasure….What’s really the juicy sweet spot of this story [is] the author’s envisioning of New York City as a special, magical and very old place….Kaufmann weaves a pretty compelling mystery story. This is a book you ought to be reading.

I’ve mentioned before that sales of Dying Is My Business and Die and Stay Dead were disappointing, and that St. Martin’s will only publish the third and final book in the trilogy if sales improve drastically. So if you’re a fan of the series, please tell all your friends. And if you haven’t tried it yet, now’s the perfect time to start!

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There’s some sad news to report today, too. World Fantasy Award-winning author Tanith Lee has passed away at the much too young age of 67. I interacted with her briefly back in the early 1990s. I worked for The Overlook Press at the time and we were publishing her Secret Books of Paradys series. She was such a good a writer, and she left us with a lifetime’s worth of amazing fiction. Rest in peace, Tanith Lee.

This week on The Scariest Part, my guest is Nathan Ballingrud, who, for my money, is one of the best writers currently working in the short form of horror, fantasy, and the weird. His multiple award-nominated 2013 collection North American Lake Monsters is a must-read. His latest publication is a novella called The Visible Filth. Here’s the publisher’s description:

“Inside it’s all just worms.”

When Will discovers a cell phone after a violent brawl his life descends into a nightmare.
Affable, charismatic and a little shallow, he’s been skating across the surface of life in a state of carefully maintained contentment. He decides to keep the cell phone just until the owner returns and everything changes. Then the messages begin.

Will’s discovered something unspeakable and it’s crawling slowly into the light.

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Nathan Ballingrud:

When I come to a horror story as a reader, I’m hoping to satisfy one of two cravings. One is aesthetic. If I can get a good rendering of some of the traditional trappings of the genre, I will leave sated and happy. These range anywhere from the brooding atmospherics of Stoker and his Carpathian vampire, to the Mi-Gos and their brain cylinders hiding out in Lovecraft’s rural countryside, to the baroque flourishes of Clive Barker and his Cenobites. Horror draws from a very deep well, and the possibilities here are all but inexhaustible. The other is psychological. This is the kind of horror that feels like a welcome attack, and leaves me feeling blighted and raw. The Appalachian dooms of Cormac McCarthy. The psychological vivisections of Joyce Carol Oates. This is a tougher target to hit. It’s a sniper shot versus the strafing of a machine gun. Sometimes you’re lucky and you get both, as you do in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, or in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (which is, for my money, the greatest horror novel yet written).

There are a lot of elements of aesthetic horror in The Visible Filth. You get your monsters crawling out of people’s broken heads. You get your cryptic messages from beyond. You get your cockroach swarms. I include that stuff because I love it. It satisfies the enthusiast in me, the part that would happily live in Transylvania or in Arkham, eager for a lifetime of bright, beautiful terrors. But ultimately, that’s all window dressing. For me, the real horror is psychological. Because these are the mundane horrors that we’re all subject to. They don’t carry the awful glamor of the Gothic or the surreal. They don’t leave us prostrate with holy fear. They just chew away at us with a vicious, microbial tenacity. We think we’re fine until we’re crumbling in upon ourselves.

There’s a scene in The Visible Filth, near the end, in which Will, our protagonist, is trying to break things off with Carrie, his girlfriend. (This is kind of a spoiler, I guess, but not a very serious one. It’s okay to keep reading; any story that’s worth a damn is not going to be ruined by minor spoilers.) He’s got it all planned out. He thinks he’s about to step into a wider, better life. But it doesn’t go the way he expects it to. Carrie is her own person, it turns out, and she has some ideas of her own. Nothing scary happens in this scene, other than the end of a relationship that leaves both parties wounded and a little self-hating. It’s my favorite scene in the novella, because I’ve been on both sides of that talk, and it’s awful either way. The story doesn’t end there — the big, set-piece horror ending is right around the corner — but for me, it’s the emotional heart of the story. It’s the real horror.

I’m not scared by the monsters. I’m comforted by them. Each genre offers its readers the consolations of the familiar; in horror fiction, that often means monsters, atmosphere, and threat. I’m scared by the human. I’m scared by the part of me that can’t bridge the chasm between myself and the person sitting across the table from me, who’s wondering who I am, wondering what thing it is inside me that causes me to do the things I do. As I wonder the same thing about her. I’m scared of what’s hiding in my own skull, and what might be hiding in yours.

Nathan Ballingrud: Facebook / Twitter

The Visible Filth: This Is Horror / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Powell’s

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories, from Small Beer Press; and The Visible Filth, a novella from This Is Horror. His work has appeared in numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and he has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his daughter in Asheville, NC.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All the stories in Link’s second collection are five-star stories. Her fiction is surreal, whimsical, fantastical, childlike in many ways, and yet it often goes to darker places than you’d expect. Put simply, it’s brain food. Her stories light up parts of your brain that don’t normally get lit up. On top of that, she makes it look so effortless with flawless prose and perfect turns of phrase.

However, reading an entire collection of her stories can be an overwhelming feast, or at least it was for this reader. Back to back, the stories meld together too easily and the concepts and tropes that Link frequently draws upon become more noticeable: animals as totems, magical bags that hold anything and everything, people who are dead but don’t behave dead, characters with names that aren’t names like Small and Soap and Germ and Alibi, and third-person POVs that become narrators who speak directly to the reader. Not that these are bad things. Link’s stories never bore, but read all together they can become thematically repetitive, which steals some of their magic.

Still, Link is in a league of her own and these stories are well worth your time and attention. My favorite is probably the title story, “Magic for Beginners,” but choosing a favorite from among these gems is a difficult task and one that’s likely to change every time I think about this stellar collection.

View all my reviews

“Meeting writers is usually disappointing, at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren’t necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children’s book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks.”

— Kelly Link, “Magic for Beginners”