Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell is one of the best horror collections I’ve ever read, and, if you like the darkest of dark fiction, you should read it. Yes, I know it was published in April and tons of ink, virtual and otherwise, have been spilled lauding this diabolical sextet of shorts, but I wanted you to hear it from a hometown boy.
Full disclosure: I like Nathan Ballingrud. I have yet to meet him in person, but we share a book-to-film agent, we say how-do-you-do on social media, and we frequent some of the same bookstores. He seems like a perfectly charming fellow. Don’t let it fool you — this man can and will scare the bejesus out of you.
If an infernal realm exists, it’s probably closer to some cities than others, right? And nobody will be surprised to find New Orleans turning up twice in Wounds. In the collection’s opener, "The Atlas of Hell," a book dealer is forced by underworld criminals to go to a bayou to retrieve an ‘atlas’ brought back from the actual underworld, but it’s not what you think it is. It’s worse. The penultimate story, "The Visible Filth," concerns an uptown New Orleans bartender who goes down a particularly nasty rabbit hole when he looks at photos on a cell phone left at his bar after a fight.
In "The Diabolist," a Lovecraftian tingler set in the town of Angel’s Rest, an imp lures a daughter to continue her father’s wicked work. "Skullpocket," the ‘lightest’ story of the bunch, celebrates a ghoul’s death-day with such macabre delight it resembles a hardcore Beetlejuice as krakens menace shores, jarred heads roll on treads, and corpses don fleshy mouths and tongues to speak. "The Maw" follows an old man on a quest to fetch his elderly dog back from a neighborhood that has been horrifically conquered by the forces of hell.
But the finest course is saved for last. In "The Butcher’s Table," 17th-century pirates smuggle infernal treasures, like the terrifying lotushead (a sort of anemone made of tongues), while pursued by fearsome carrion angels:
Seven feet tall, their thin bodies wrapped in fluttering black cloth, they listed back and forth as they walked, their bones creaking like the rigging of ships… some [of those who saw them] stopped and fired a few wild shots before running. The carrion angels were oblivious, their bodies accepting the violence the way a corpse accepts the worm. Think Clive Barker meets Black Sails. When the eponymous Butcher’s Table sails to the waters below, it carries passengers — diabolists and cannibal priests hoping to tempt Lucifer himself to dine with them on the shores of Hell.
What could go wrong?
Congratulations are due to Mr. Ballingrud, not only because several of these stories are in development for film — Wounds, based on "The Visible Filth," will be released soon — but because, with this exquisitely awful collection, he has crafted a genre-defining hellscape none who read it will soon forget.
Saint Petersburg native Christopher Buehlman tours the renaissance festival circuit as Christophe the Insultor. He is the author of five horror novels, including 2012 World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Novel, Those Across the River. His television writing debut, "The Man in the Suitcase," will air on Shudder’s upcoming reboot of Creepshow.
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This article appears in Jun 20-27, 2019.