It’s simple, really: Of all of the writers I have read lately, Nathan Ballingrud writes the kind of stories that I would like to write. I might have enjoyed Kelly Link’s collection more, or found Laird Barron and Elizabeth Hand stories I had a greater appreciation for, but none of them speak to me the way Ballingrud does. I see him as both a kindred spirit and a guide, someone I both slightly resemble and hope to emulate.

I enjoy reading interviews with authors I am going to read, to get an idea of their intentions and obsessions. I read an interview with Ballingrud where he talked about genre, which he reported he had a love/hate relationship with. He says,”I think it can be an effective tool, but it’s important to remember that that’s all it is. A writer must serve the story, not the genre.” I talked about some of the same concerns in the cover letter to my application to Stonecoast–a desire to both utilize genre (especially horror), but not be beholden to it. I love including weird elements in my fiction, but I have always had other preoccupations in my work: dysfunctional relationships, fear of mortality, coping with loss, the struggle of raising children. So many of those same thematic concerns are present in the stories in Ballingrud’s collection, which really excited me. And so many of these stories were told the way I tell a story: dialogue-driven, with a strong focus on the emotional/internal state of the viewpoint character. I feel like the stories in Monsters are the type of stories I can aspire to write, stories I can both appreciate and have the skill set to someday execute.

The stories in Monsters don’t only feel familiar, however. They also feel instructive. Like he mentioned in the interview quoted above, Ballingrud doesn’t rely on the weird elements in his plots to motor his stories. “Wild Acre” is a good example of this. Although the story does include a werewolf attack, that is not the story’s focus. Instead, we a treated to a stunning meditation on grief and guilt, through the eyes of a man uncomfortable with articulating his emotions. There are no weird elements in the last twenty-six pages of the story, yet it is haunted by the earlier supernatural event. Ballingrud utilizes this oblique approach to the uncanny again and again–the dead animal on the beach in “North American Lake Monsters,” the angels in “The Monsters of Heaven,” the trunk of human skin in “You Go Where It Takes You”–never allowing the weird to overshadow the human heart of each of those stories. I remember someone once defined science fiction as a type of story where, if you took out the science, the story would fall apart. I would contened that you could replace the weird elements in most of Ballingrud’s stories with a realistic analogue and they wouldn’t fall apart. Some may find that to be a problem. I don’t–I like that Ballingrud uses horror to enhance, not overwhelm. It’s a tricky thing to do, but well worth the effort.

Another thing I took away from Monsters (and from the story I struggled to write over the last two months) was how much easier it is to use all of your narrative facilities when writing in the third person. Ballingrud writes every story in this collection in third person. He almost has to, as he goes out of his way to develop characters who are not like him. Most of his protagonists are not very self aware, and are far from as articulate as their author. It would be exceedingly difficult to rely on the narrative voices of these characters to carry their stories. Instead, Ballingrud is able to reveal their character through dialogue and action, while preserving a significant degree of lyricism. Indeed, there was an instance while reading “The Good Husband” where I marvelled at how eloquent a writer Ballingrud was without ever once appearing showy or pretentious. I realize now that when you write in first person you are hamstrung by the parameters of your character; you have to save the whole of your linguistic palette for your third person stories (unless, of course, all of your first-person narrators share your level of education and erudition, which probably makes them much less vibrant).

I have enjoyed, to one degree or another, just about everything I have read recently. I have learned from all of it, too. But this collection by Ballingrud? All I can say is that I’m glad that I read it. Very glad.