Nathan Ballingrud’s 2013 collection North American Lake Monsters has a double punch of stories back to back—“The Monsters of Heaven” and “Sunbleached”—with images that still haunt my dreams. A wingless, taloned, dark angel fallen into a dumpster gets taken into a bleak menage à trois. A pulpy, burnt wreck of a vampire seduces boys from the crawlspace of a house, voice seeping through the floorboards. I can’t choose between them, and I don’t think you should either, so I’ll tell you about both.
I first picked up the book in 2020. I was just beginning to take my own fiction writing seriously and feeling a bit unsure of what kind of writer I wanted to be. What I liked most about these stories, and what I’ve carried with me as I’ve developed as a writer, is that the human characters, at the point where their lives encounter the monstrous fantastic, already had plenty of monstrosity to deal with in their regular existence. The couple in “The Monsters of Heaven” have lost their son, who was abducted from the playground while the father napped on a bench. The house the vampire shelters under is already on its last legs, half-destroyed by a hurricane and struggling to survive after their father abandoned them. These are not the-humans-were-the-real-monsters-all-along stories, or not only that, but rather revelations of the sublime terror that exists always at the margins of our existence, ready to overwhelm us. Some of us just live closer to those margins, whether through ecology or poverty, alienation or desire. If on the news broadcast in the background a man is “smiling triumphantly and holding aloft an angel’s severed head,” or if your son is boiling with a vampiric fever? You still have to go to work.
Sally Parlier is a writer from the mountains of Western North Carolina. She currently lives in Raleigh and teaches first-year writing at NC State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Seize The Press, Strange Horizons, and BOMB Magazine. Visit sallyparlier.com for the occasional update.