I’m Nathan Ballingrud, author of The Strange, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, and North American Lake Monsters. My novella “The Visible Filth” was made into a movie called Wounds, written and directed by Babak Anvari, and North American Lake Monsters was adapted into the Hulu series Monsterland by Mary Laws. My new novella Crypt of the Moon Spider is forthcoming in 2024.

Here you’ll find occasional blog posts, interviews and reviews, and a bibliography.

A still from the movie, Wounds (2019)

You can order signed copies of any of my books from Malaprop’s Bookstore. Personalizations upon request! You’ll be supporting a great local bookstore in the bargain.

From Elizabeth Hand:

Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters is an exceptional fictional debut: It deserves a place alongside collections like Peter Straub’s Magic Terror, Scott Wolven’s Controlled Burn, Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Like those works, Ballingrud’s stories delve into the damaged psyches of American men, with a distinctly twenty-first-century awareness of the world we now inhabit, itself as damaged as the shellshocked figures that populate it. Ballingrud’s tales are ostensibly tales of terror, meticulously constructed and almost claustrophobically understated in their depiction of an all- encompassing horror that, despite its often unearthly shimmer, is human rather than supernatural in origin; Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as reimagined by Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy.

From Victor LaValle:

Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.