Ballingrud’s novel length debut is not ‘bad’, so to say, but the story failed to connect with me. I can’t fully point at what the problem was – it might have been the fictional 1930s Mars, which was obviously a fake construct – a cross between Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Western movies and a bunch of other stuff.

After some time, I started to notice it simply didn’t engage me. I didn’t care about what happened to the characters, and I wasn’t interested in the world building either. I stopped reading at 55%. It might have been the prose – somehow it seemed devoid of a soul. In all fairness, this got high praise elsewhere, amongst others from Speculiction.

I still have high hopes for Ballingrud’s short story collection North American Lake Monsters though. The short form seems better suited for his kind of fantastica – for this particular reader at least.

Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

File under: Like but don't love. Whatever else this novel is, it's a shout-out to Ray Bradbury and the classic Western, as an adolescent woman finds herself caught up in a failing colony on Mars that has lost contact with Earth, and goes hunting for satisfaction against those who have wrecked her life. I also suspect that this story is meant to be food for thought for what one's self would do if stuck in a situation of mass social collapse. There's nothing I can fault the book for in terms of writing, and the depiction of the main character.

What I'm less fond of is that this story is told as a quasi-memoir, which I tend not to like. Also, considering Ballingrud's previous track record as a horror writer, I perhaps expected this story to take more of a Lovecraftian turn, but events didn't turn out that way. Though the reader does get a shot of creepiness in the end, I'll admit that I found it a little slight compared to the build-up. In any case, it'll be interesting to see what Ballingrud comes up with next. ( )

We can’t unlearn what we know about Mars. Bradbury crafted excellent tales in the period before we knew much about the Red Planet. Unfortunately this novel acts as if Mars is not seriously hostile to life. DNF. ( )

So sometimes when I go to sleep, I listen to old radio programs. Stuff like “The Red Skelton Show”, “Abbot and Costello”, “The Great Gildersleeve”, etc. My favorites are “Gunsmoke” and “X Minus One”, a science fiction anthology. This is like a combination of those two. Think of the forties/fifties fascination with Mars (e.g. War of the Worlds, John Carter of Mars) believing it could hold alien life. Combine that with the “new frontier” setting of Westerns. It looks like hard science fiction, but there’s nothing hard about it. It’s got robots and spaceships. It doesn’t go into a fifty-page essay about how the oxygen reclamators work.

On the surface, it’s a weird Western. It’s “True Grit” meets “The Martian Chronicles”. But the deeper you go, it becomes science fiction horror. The only horror movie I can think of taking place on another planet is Ghosts of Mars, a terrible movie with Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge fighting zombies. All the rest take place in space like Alien and Event Horizon. (I guess Aliens does take place on a planet, but it feels more like an isolated facility.)

For a novel, it’s short. 76,000 words. There are times where I’m reading what the main character thinks of so-and-so character, so-and-so other character, the situation she’s in. It’s like a pattern: action-analysis, action-analysis. Scene-sequel. And I’m like “DO something.” Like the author’s trying to make a word count.

It’s pretty good. Not great, not exceptional. I picked this up because both Justin McElroy and Mike Krahulik recommended it. The concept is better than the execution, but not by much. I guess this guy has mostly written short stories before this. This is his first novel, and it’s a good first novel. (Certainly better than mine was.) The guy just needs to brush up on his style to not be so “thoughtful” to make my taste. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2023/06/review-of-strange-by-nathan-ballingrud.... ( )