Love is the Mutant Maker: The Short Stories of Nathan Ballingrud

A review of North American Lake Monsters and Wounds through the lens of Julia Kristeva.

“Exile always involves a shattering of the former body.”

 – Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

It is no special thing to be a lover of literature, but it is, perhaps, a special thing to be oversaturated, overstimulated, and trembling beneath the weight of burn-out and executive dysfunction and find yourself falling back in love with literature. It was in such a place – a craggy abyss suspended somewhere between dysregulated cortisol levels and malignant insomnia – that I finally picked up the copy of Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters I had bought a year prior while traveling. I had originally gravitated to the cover of the collection due to the depiction of Constellation Cetus, a constellation of particular interest to me – and one that is endemic to the art and nature of monstrosity. How intuitive, how synchronous, how cool! Here is a collection dedicated to the variable nature of monstrosity featuring the canonical Monster Mother of firmamental myth! And so it sat, and waited, and stared at me from my bedside table while I postponed, procrastinated, and felt the cumulative guilt of knowing I was neglecting reading a book I really, truly was meant to read.

We’ll talk another time about unread-book-guilt, or UBG, the paralyzing sensation that leads you to apologize to all the books stacked in their miniature towers waiting for their moment to be read. But eight months after I carried it back home with me, NALM got its turn. I count this collection as primarily responsible for me not just falling in love with literature again, not just falling in love with reading again, not even just falling in love with writing again, but even more-so, falling in love with love again. The stories in NALM are love stories, even in the moments they are most perverse, most grotesque. I think they are love stories most especially when they are at their most perverse and their most grotesque. I believe there is nothing more abject and totally mutilating than love. Nothing which more profoundly transubstantiates us into a shimmering flesh-wound, a gaping mouth which plucks its teeth out to pay the price for desire. 

Normally we conflate the abominations of love under the name of limerance, but I argue that true love is even more monstrous than the most mutating of obsessions. Limerance and its sibling Obsession are ultimately ephemeral things – they sweep through our bodies and possess us as a spirit might, but they leave when they get bored of the sourness of our viscera. And so we, too, get bored, move on, picking up the pieces of our flesh we flayed along the way. Love is an undying thing, it is the heart pounding against the chest in the rhythm of stone tape theory. Love does not know how, or when, or why it should walk away, it does not recognize self-preservation. Love is a residual haunting –and if we were to give credence to Freud’s Mourning vs. Melancholia (and I do give credence to it) – many of us never fully retrieve the investments of libidinal drive from the bank of the Other. This is why I find myself perpetually obsessed with discussing the relationship between the (false) binary opposition of Humanity and Monstrosity and their synthesizing phenomena of Love.

This is why I find myself obsessed with both of Nathan Ballingrud’s story collections: the aforementioned NALM, but also his infernal coterie of Wounds. If Clive Barker was our authorial psychopomp through the exquisite transgressions of desire, Ballingrud is the adroit captain of a small brig navigating the ocean of love’s terror. His humans are monsters and his monsters are human. They are aching rib cages serving as otherworldly sieves through which we process our own yearning, our own grief, our own hunger. The characters are so real that you find yourself mourning alongside each of them – some, perhaps more than others – be it Beltran in “The Way Station”, or the captured Love Mill spirit in “The Diabolist”. Story after story I found myself torturously invested in the lives of these people, caught up in the desperation and the hauntings which live inside “The Wild Acre” or “The Good Husband”, and the eviscerating grief and regret of “Sunbleached”. The reddened hand which binds us to sins both real and imagined lurks within these narratives: a shadow of our nameless crimes. I still distinctly remember finishing “The Monsters of Heaven” and having to sit quietly for an hour, contending with the soft and rotting places hidden in my guts.

The theme of nostalgia as its own affliction emerges and re-emerges throughout these works. Nostalgia as an infestation which takes up in the bones and engraves them in a script from places and spaces one may never return, but continues to feel like a native tongue. Like existing with the warm and claustrophobic nature of Louisiana’s various bodies of standing water, “The Way Station”, “The Good Husband”, “The Monsters From Heaven”, “Sunbleached”, and a good deal more all hinge upon the poison of memory and its parasitic consumption of our spirit. Those prone to this type of nostalgia –myself most certainly included– recognize it as a sort of living fossilization. We savor being slowly subsumed into an amber-sap chrysalis where we’ll incubate in what-was and what-could-have-been for enough eternities to mar whatever high hopes or expectations reincarnation might have for the rupturing blister of our soul. It brings to mind a favorite Kristeva quote from Strangers to Ourselves:

And even he who, seemingly, flees the slimy poison of depression, does not hold back, as he lies in bed, during those glaucus moments between waking and sleeping. For in the intervening period of nostalgia, saturated with fragrances and sounds to which he no longer belongs and which, because of that, wound him less than those of the here and now, the foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, one exquisitely depressed.

The emotional perspicacity of Ballingrud’s characters is remarkable, but it is elevated to an evocative fever pitch by the thick elegance of his writing. Deeply textured worlds with immeasurably imaginable landscapes: kites of flesh, the interior caverns of angel-skulls, the translucent humanoid banquet, the-thing-in-the-jar, the many-tongued-sort-of-flower, all of these equally grotesque and beautiful details serve as character and filigree alike. The language is rich and poetic while never veering toward purple, but remaining instead as a dulcet lull, as if overheard on a mosquito-laden porch. A storyteller who knows a little too much about the truth of his stories – a storyteller who has tasted the insides of the things he writes. My fascination with Ballingrud’s lucid poetics only seems to grow.

It is true, Ballingrud can make us even pine for our own admission to Hell, where all the winged and slithering phantasmagoria seep into the bloodstream with kaleidoscopic beauty. His monsters are monsters that the human in us wishes to devour, while the monster inside of us seeks to reject. These mirrors held up by these monsters are black mirrors, black as the waters of Hell in “The Butcher’s Table”. 

At a certain point, a great story demands that you bleed for it. A collection, a litany of great stories, demands a pound of flesh – in this case, harvested from the toughest leather of the heart, ideally a section that dons the scars of many prior agonies. Great stories require that you meet them where they are, whether that be a dive bar in New Orleans, the outcropping of a  shore in Hell, an Arctic crevasse, or an Appalachian forest. As Kristeva continues in Strangers to Ourselves, “Meeting balances wandering. A crossroad of two othernesses, it welcomes the foreigner without tying him down, opening the host to his visitor without committing him. A mutual recognition, the meeting owes its success to its temporary nature, and it would be torn by conflicts if it were to be extended”. Ballingrud’s stories meet you, and then they release you, though often you find yourself wishing that they had not let you go.

I will not say that the secret of all horror and of all monsters is Love, but I will maintain that it is often the shadow of the monster when the monsters are worth remembering. It is Love as a character and proper noun, as a plot, as an environment, but it is also the Love of the author who cannot craft the Ideal and so revels in the flaws of the thing. North American Lake Monsters and Wounds drip with love from the inside, and they are saturated with a love which veils them from the outside. A love for a city beleaguered with monsters and beasts, a love for the fragile and desperate hope which exists within every human pushed to the limits of their emotional boundaries, a love for the choices we make because of love, in spite of love, and to spite love. There is mystery and there is an inundating vulnerability and there are the outstretched hands of a lover who cannot return to their relationship the same creature as they were when they started. It is impossible to not witness ourselves within this work, to contend with our own debilitating eagerness and longing, with our paralyzing sense of aloneness and the extent we are willing to go to in order to not be quite so alone anymore.

If you are looking to fall in love with monsters, with humanity, and with yourself, you’ll find few finer invitations than these collections – these sulphuric miniature biographies of monstrosity. What a privilege to find a writer who makes you grateful to be present with the unbearable responsibility of being alive.