The stories bookending Wounds are its highest quality content as well as inter-related. The left bookend is “The Atlas of Hell”, a bloody, dark, Weird tale of the occult in the back alleys and bayous of New Orleans. About a rare book dealer who dabbles in old magick, his business dealings find him in over his head as a powerful buyer wants one of his artifacts returned. A trip to the deep swamp needed, things twist, then twist again. Savage, unflinching, and chilling in its skulls, candles, and encounters with the inexplicable, it nicely tightropes the fence between existential and body horror.
Forming the right bookend is the origin story of “The Atlas of Hell”, a piece called “The Butcher's Table”. More precisely “The Butcher's Table”, the story is set in the Gulf of Mexico in the 18th century and is centered on the titular pirate ship and the nightmare mission it undertakes to help a secret British society convene a meeting in hell. Filled to the brim with dark, macabre imagery and forever moving in unpredictable directions, it is without a doubt the best story in the collection. Likely what I am about to say is recency bias, but hell, at this exact moment “The Butcher's Table” is the best pirate story I've ever read. Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle—all are excellent bits of sails and swashbuckling, but Ballingrud's hellish concoction takes the smoldering skull. The collection is worth the price for this novella alone.
Packed between the bookends are four other stories of varying merit. For all the emo girls out there, “The Diabolist” tells of a teenager whose theomancing father passes quietly away one night in his lounge chair. In the course of exploring his secret basement laboratory, the girl turns up all sorts of strange things, and in an attempt to deal with her grief and loss she puts into motion an idea that probably she'll later think twice about. Positively lighthearted (at least for Ballingrud), “Skullpocket” is an Addam's Family style story if the family were ghouls. Rituals and ceremonies abound as one of their patriarchs prepares for death while the town readies for a ghoulish festival. Other readers may enjoy Ballignrud's lighter tone here, but for me the story does not play to his strengths, and in fact sticks out like a sore thumb in the collection.
An apocalyptic cityscape clouded in mystery, “The Maw” tells of a an old man who has lost his dog in a razed urban area riddled with stick-like monsters. Hiring a brash young woman to help rescue the dog, together the two go deep into stick-figure territory as evil escalates around them. The story most like anything from North American Lake Monsters is “The Visible Filth”. About an alcoholic bartender and his slow but steady descent after finding a mobile phone in his bar one night, Ballingrud does a great job normalizing the challenges such people have. More subtlety was needed in the characters and dialogue to properly identify the descent, but that being said, the stands strongly on its existential two feet, and the recurrent symbolism is cohesive and effective. (For the record, the film version of the story, called Wounds, while also lacking said subtlety, is an excellent adaptation.)
In the end, Wounds is another strong collection from Ballingrud. There are inconsistencies and some gaps here and there compared to North American Lake Monsters, but the author's strong style remains on display. It continues to pull the reader into some very dark visions whether they want to be there or not. If you want evil, visceral fiction in short form, one hand holding a molotov cocktail, the other scribbling pagan runes on parchment, then do check out Wounds. And as mentioned, if you want the darkest, evilest, greatest pirate story ever written, then don't wait.
The following are the six stories from the borders of hell:
The Atlas of Hell
The Diabolist
Skullpocket
The Maw
The Visible Filth
The Butcher's Table
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