Status Updates From North American Lake Monsters

"The Good Husband": 4/5 - not very original, there have been a lot of stories about men being romantic with corpses of their wives/mothers, but this is certainly one of the most disturbing examples. Vaguely Pet Sematary. Very uncomfortable, very vivid.

“How do you know, Dad? When did you ever have to deal with it? It was always me! I was the one at home with her. I was the one who had to call the hospital that one time I found her in her own blood and then call you so you could come! I was the one who..."

Listen to her apologize, and accept her apologies. Profess your reinvigorated love. Fuck her with the urgency of pity and mortality and fear, which you both have come to know and to rely on the way you once relied on love and physical desire.

They ended the night sitting on the edge of the bed...weeping soundlessly, a little furrow between her eyebrows but otherwise without affect, and the light sheen of tears which flowed and flowed, as though a foundation had cracked; and he in the red robe she’d bought him for Christmas, his arm around her, trying once again to reason her away from a precipice which reason did not know.

"The Way Station": 2/5 - a very New Orleansy story that might be about a homeless man who was evacuated during Katrina, but it's hard to tell because no one reacts when he shows them what is apparently a literal window into the entire city, located in the middle of his chest. As difficult to understand as it is to visualize, and Ballingrud isn't giving us any hints on this one. Frustrating poetry.

"I almost went home"...
"I can't go home. I'm stuck here forever now. God damn it!"

Huh? This is a weird time for Ballingrud to go Samuel Beckett on us.

I love all the NOLA locales, but the story after this one is called "The Good Husband." You can't get this far into this collection and read that phrase without recoiling. Probly gonna be rough...but this one about a wound that smells like fresh-baked bread could be fun. Relatively,

"North American Lake Monsters": 2/5 - expected a lot more from the titular story, but it's yet another group of morally broken people who find the corpse of a glowing magical being. This time, spoiler alert, they don't eat it. The characters don't change at all. At least in the previous version, the couple ends up bonding over their shared carnivorous lunar activities. So much potential here, just goes nowhere.

Admittedly, I am biased towards creature-monsters over human ones (where's the fun in that?), but even more than I expected to, I'm starting to resent this litany of human atrocities. Being cruel to the people who love you is horrific--we get it--but we're still subjected to toddler abuse, a mother abandoning her child, a teen feeding his family to a vampire and a now, an abusive father. Plus animal cruelty.

"No, fuck that. I'm more me than ever." The contrast of this line with the broken-spirited empathy demonstrated by the daughter and wife is chilling. Juxtaposed against finding a monster washed up on the shores of a lake, it's still totally convincing as a man who's been spoiled by hard experiences.

"Sunbleached": 3/5 - great title and premise, but a complete abandonment of resolution in this very original, unsatisfying story about a vampire hiding under a New Orleans house while recovering from a grievous injury. A boy living in the house sees the vampire's bite as a way out of his dreary life and promises to invite him in after transforming, but doesn't consider that someone else might invite him in first.

Another great opening, hopefully it goes somewhere better:

“We’re God’s beautiful creatures,” the vampire said, something like joy leaking into its voice for the first time since it had crawled under this house four days ago.

"The Monsters of Heaven": 2/5 - again, draws you in immediately, immaculate prose, hard to forget, but this might be the most pointlessly depressing and disgusting story I've read this year. Oh wait, there was The Sixth Nik.

These stories are darker and crueler to animals than I'd have expected.

"The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: 2/5 - a captivating premise gives way to aimless brutality and totally unexplained weirdness. No character progression or resolution. Trying to remember how I felt about this when I read it 4 years ago in Datlow's collection. Hadn't taken note of Ballingrud yet, so maybe my reaction was similar.

This is probably an unfair presumption, but based on what I know about Nathan Ballingrud's writing, the only conclusion I can draw about "The Crevasse" (written with Dale Bailey) is that Bailey kinda sucks. Loose ends, crass emotional manipulation, no resolution, no real character development. Nothing I've read by Ballingrud has been had these problems.

For horror fans, there's one very particular connection between the name McReady and Antarctica--can't believe Ballingrud wasn't tipping the hat there. Such high hopes for this one. What a beginning.

This kind of authenticity and seamless exposition separate Ballingrud from fiction authors who are just very good:

"Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan...Two sledges. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.

"SS": 5/5 - this story is an irresistible force that takes the reader through an authentic vision of New Orleans to a white supremacist group and a prospective member whose horrific home life reveals new meaning for the word "monster." The ending is something you would never expect, operating on a mode of empathy not previously touched on. Completely unforgettable. Perfect.

"Wild Acre": 4/5 - a fun, convincing story about survival guilt following the aftermath of an attack by what may have been a lycanthrope. No cliches here, but it sacrifices a little bit of satisfaction in the resolution for the originality.

"You Go Where It Takes You": 4/5 - this shocking, heartbreaking story of a single mother trying to care for her toddler amidst a slew of unreliable boyfriends, some particularly strange, is economical in its words, drawing the reader in irresistibly. Then it ends, and you realize how the concept of a monster is represented in the story, and it's one of the saddest things I've ever read. So powerful, but so sad.

"Because she already knows about possibilities. Long as you know there are options in life, you get scared of choosing the wrong one...

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. She’s afraid of what she’ll lose...Of who she’ll never get to be."