Nathan Ballingrud QUOTES

1 " Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

2 " Something big was trapped inside him, some great sadness, and he felt if he could cry, or even articulate it in speech, it would relieve the pressure and provide him some measure of relief. But he couldn't reach it. He couldn't find a way to address it. He wondered if it would become the thing that defined him. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , The Visible Filth

3 " A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It's a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

4 " Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. Lf there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was part of being human, he supposed. That's what the booze was for. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , The Visible Filth

5 " He imagined the room bathed in blood, himself striding through it, a raven amongst the carcasses. Strutting like any carrion king. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

6 " […] Although it’s hard to imagine it now, there was a time when horror was nearly unrivaled in popularity with the general reader. In the 1970s and ’80s, local bookstores had whole shelves devoted to it. You couldn’t miss them: they were the ones stocked between Mystery and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, with all the black and red covers, the raised titles dripping blood, and the leering skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. These books had notoriously short shelf lives, but because there was such a demand for them—owing largely to the success of books like The Exorcist and writers like Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub—it was possible to hack a living if you could turn them out fast enough.

A lot of folks tried their hand, and a lot of bad books were published. So many that the market eventually collapsed under its own weight. Among those bad books, though, were some truly great ones written by great writers—writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, to name just three—who delivered lasting contributions to the genre. While it would be nice to think that all the deserving books were saved from being swept away in the vast tide, that just wasn’t the case. [...]

Excerpt from ”Introduction” to Michael McDowell’s ”Blackwater: The Complete Saga” (2017, Kindle edition) "

― Nathan Ballingrud

7 " She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

8 " She learned that there was an animal living inside her, something that celebrated when nature did its work upon the weak. She came to value that animal. "

― Nathan Ballingrud ,

9 " She didn’t want to hear his story. Everybody had one. Tragedy gets boring after a while. "

― Nathan Ballingrud ,

10 " He tells us that occasionally there are men and women who wander through Hell in thin processions, wearing heavy gray robes and bearing lanterns to light their way. They are invariably chained together and led through the burning canyons by a loping demon: some malformed, tooth-spangled pinwheel of limbs and claws. They tour safely because they are shuttered against the sights and sounds of Hell by the iron boxes around their heads, which give them the appearance of strange astronauts on a pilgrimage through fire. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

11 " When she looked at him again she had raised windows for eyes, with curtains blowing out of them, framing a yellow-lit room. Below them, her face declined in wet shingles, flowing with little rivulets of rainwater. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

12 " Jeremy supposed that a Christmas party full of elementary school professionals might be the worst place in the world. He would drift among them helplessly, like a grizzly bear in a roomful of children, expected not to eat anyone. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

13 " And then Carlos thought, You left me. You left me in the end. Why? He hugged his dog close, burying his nose in her fur. He knew there was no answer beyond the obvious, constant imbalance in any transaction of the heart. You don’t love me the way I love you. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

14 " They moved roughly, urgently, breathing in the musk of each other, breathing in too the smell of the pines and the lake and the dead monster, this last growing in power until it occluded the others, until it filled his sinuses, his head, his body, until it seemed nothing existed except that smell and the awful thing that made it, until it seemed he was its source, the wellspring of all the foulness of the earth, and when he spent himself into her he thought for a wretched moment that he had somehow injected it with the possibility of new life. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

15 " He used to feel smaller than them, less significant, as if he’d been born without some essential gene to make him acceptable to other people. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

16 " He started down the highway, walking along the edge of stopped traffic. He felt the weightlessness of mercy. He was a striding Christ. Sounds filtered through to him: people yelling and pleading; footsteps splashing through the rain; a distant, stranded siren. From somewhere behind him a man’s sob, weird and ululating, rose above the wreckage and disappeared into the sky, a flaming rag. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

17 " He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men cast their prayers. It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs, while the world around him broke silently into snow, and into night. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

18 " He looks up at the sky--and there, in the thunderheads, he finds something familiar. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

19 " He felt the guilt move inside of him, huge but seemingly distant, like a whale passing beneath a boat. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

20 " It had changed since this morning. It actually was shedding light, for one thing, though it was a dim phosphorescence, the result of some strange fungus or bacterium running amuck through its innards. The creature looked like some ghastly oversized nightlight. The gash that was either a mouth or a wound had borne fruit: a weird and vibrant flora spilled from it like fruit from a cornucopia, pale protuberances with growths like outstretched arms listing this way and that, a dozen vegetable christs. Life abounded here: small chitinous animals hurried busily to and fro, conducting their miserable business in tunnels and passageways in the body, provided for them by nature or their own savage industry; a cloud of insects, drunk on the very perfume which had driven him into fits, alternately settling on its carcass and lifting away again in graceful curtains, like wind blowing through a wheatfield. "

― Nathan Ballingrud , North American Lake Monsters

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