Weird Murmur

  Nathan Ballingrud,  Cathedral of the Drowned  (Tor Publishing Group: 2025). You might not expect poignant sub-text and strong theme from a novella that includes a washed-up mad scientist, gangsters in the spider silk trade, a giant centipede, and Catholic missions that involve launching cathedrals into space. But Ballingrud delivers on all of this in his pulpy and intelligent sequel to Crypt of the Moon Spider .   Not only do we learn more about the moon spider silk introduced in Crypt , but this is a story about people struggling with their identity when they recognize that the different sides of their personalities and psychologies stand in deep tension with one another. The novella manages to breathe fresh life into the old sci-fi fixture of a collective mind by taking it on in the context of individuals trying to integrate their own fragmented personalities into a cohesive whole. Enjoyable on so many levels!

Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange (Saga Press: 2023). This is weird science fiction that leaves you with a sense of cosmic awe!  I am fascinated by the take on alien otherness here. It reminds me of the manner in which Adrian Tchaikovsky approaches the other, but then Ballingrud takes it a step further; he picks at a Ligotti-like paradox within our own natures: an unfathomable alien mind, but at the same time, a reflection of our own bifurcated and contradictory selves. We are alien to ourselves. With a child protagonist, Ballingrud exposes the vulnerability of human survival, the lies we tell about our concept of justice and what is fair, and the naïve notion that we have any idea what is really going on. Maybe we are nothing more than a disease.

Nathan Ballingrud, "The Monsters of Heaven" in North American Lake Monsters  (Small Beer Press: 2013). Even in heaven there are monsters of a particularly insidious type, helpful in cruel and terrible ways. But it's the best we can hope for.  This is one of my favorite stories from the book. It leaves my imagination stuck with disturbing, sick, and wet images of creatures not understood. The grief, sorrow, and confusion of Brian’s and Amy's lives are set against a backdrop of the supernatural, and the weird aspects of the story are somehow simultaneously subtle and striking. The horror hits home when you realize the mundane aspects of the story are just as confounding and scary as the supernatural one.  The narrative brings to focus aspects of our humanity that are unique to us, but, at the same time, horrifying and pitiful: the power to imagine, to fantasize, to sublimate, to pull the wool over our own eyes just to have it continually ripped off to see the ugly trut...