JAN 25 - Dead Ink Book Club - The Atlas Of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud

In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined:

“What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition”
Los Angeles Review of Books.

Now, in The Atlas of Hell, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in ‘The Visible Filth’ to the search for the map of hell in ‘The Butcher’s Table’, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on off shore oil rigs. His story ‘The Monsters of Heaven’ won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.