Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Strange | 2023 | Nathan Ballingrud | Buy |
Nathan Ballingrud’s standalone novel The Strange (2023) is set on a colonized Mars where a fourteen-year-old boy must journey across alien terrain to rescue his kidnapped father. The novel brings Ballingrud’s horror sensibility to a frontier setting, blending coming-of-age adventure with cosmic dread.
The Strange was Ballingrud’s first novel after years of writing short fiction and novellas. Mars in this book feels more like the American West than a science fiction planet, with isolated settlements and vast empty stretches between them. The horror comes from what lives in that emptiness and from the violence that colonization brings.
The book was well received by readers who already knew Ballingrud from North American Lake Monsters and Wounds. It showed he could sustain his atmospheric, character-driven approach over a full novel rather than just short stories. Readers new to his work can start here or with his collections.