Saturday Review: “Adventures, Entrepeneurs, and Scoundrels” a review by Jim Coby in NCLR Online Spring 2024 of Nathan Ballingrud’s novel The Strange (2023)
Coby begins their review with nothing but praise, proclaiming that, “Ballingrud has made fans of Paul Tremblay, Victor LaValle, Stephen Graham Jones, and countless other contemporary giants of the genre. With his first novel, The Strange, however, one can’t help but imagine that Ballingrud might soon be propelled to literary stardom.”
Ballingrud’s first novel takes us forward, and back, as the reader is propelled towards a science fiction infused past, set in the year 1931. Coby describes how “Ballingrud takes readers to an outpost on Mars named New Galveston, where adventurers, entrepreneurs, and scoundrels have settled.” Here, the oddities of Ballingrud’s new timeline make themselves known. As Coby muses, Ballingrud “. . .seems determined to carve his own niche at the intersections of speculative fiction, historical fiction, horror, bildungsroman, and literary fiction.”
Read the entire review in the Online Spring 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
