TC Book Review: Following up on his award-winning debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud continues dark excellence with novella 'The Visible Filth,' now available from This Is Horror

Cover by Pye Parr

Very little of what is classified as horror fiction or contemporary Weird fiction scares me, and that's okay, because I don't read this style of literature to be frightened. I don't like to be frightened. Truly terrified. Who does, really, if we are being totally honest with ourselves? There are plenty of undertakings one can pursue if genuine fear (not thrills, or shock) is the end result, and I don't see me or anyone else I know heading down those paths, either in a literal or metaphorical sense.

Instead, I read this style of fiction for the wonder of it all, and while the atmospherics can sometimes be unsettling, they usually just end up being cool, or interesting, or awe-inspiring in their fantastical rendering. But in terms of true terror, that is reserved for the decidedly non-fiction realm of real life monsters that burn down villages and break into your homes and hunt women and defile children and devour innocence like they're on some sort of infernal time clock. For all but the true believers, supernatural fiction is fantasy, and fantasy is never scary, as how could something that is admittedly not real serve as a threat to the safety and well being of me and my loved ones?

But Nathan Ballingrud, who does write horror and Weird fiction as well or better than anyone else tapping the keys today, is straight-up scary. Not him personally, as he's a lovely fellow. But the people, places, and things he unleashes onto the page can often be horrifying in all the full-bodied definition of the word. And I like it. My Lord, do I ever like it.

Perhaps its the sense of authenticity of the characters and settings, both of which wear the weight of imperfection like a favorite pair of jeans. Most likely, this conjuring of discomfort from within the reader comes from the way deeply buried human flaws are exhumed, dissected, and laid bare to the humid air, then left there for all to witness, without apology. The abomination of the cut wide human soul. That's unsettling stuff, and that's what Ballingrud writes, like the Larry David or Ricky Gervais of dark fiction. Squirms coated with gooseflesh.

After wowing the horror fiction world in 2013 with the release of his debut collection North American Lake Monsters, which earned him nothing less than a Shirley Jackson Award and the fierce admiration of his peers, Ballingrud continues to build his lasting legacy of pitch black, uncomfortable fiction with his new novella The Visible Filth, published by This Is Horror (an outfit I hadn't heard of prior to ordering this book, but will return to as a customer based on the professionalism and care provided by owner and managing editor Michael Wilson). This is a taut story, shot through with suspense that binds together the strips of shapeless horror of seemingly everyday people and circumstances like a filthy quilt sew with piano wire.

The story is set in New Orleans, but it could be a slice of life in any city or small town where there are bars and college students and eroding relationships. And roaches. And cell phones. This is horror with a firm sense of place, but it is also universal enough that you can feel it churning on your neighborhood block. The evils done and the threats posed aren't ripped from a pulp mag. They could be taken from the morning paper, from text drenched in terrified mystery.

None of the four main characters are incredibly likable, nor fully happy, which seems an honest appraisal of life amongst twenty- and thirty-somethings dwelling in and around the bar scene, no matter the zip code. The leads are flighty and morose and devoted to self medication, spiritually empty in that vaguely nihilistic way of slacker narcissists. A love triangle threatens to destroy an already unstable square, but before this can happen, a random act of violence in a dingy barroom is all that it takes to link a hidden vein of depravity into the group, and plunge these players into a glistening black tunnel that unspools in front of them, the ghastly terminus unknown.

The Visible Filth, like much of Ballingrud's exceptional writing, is an exercise in indefinable - but somehow familiar - horror beyond our control, or even our explanation. Monstrous things are happening just below the veneer of normal life, and all you can do is watch. And you do watch, despite revulsion, and despite your shame. The fact that you like it unlocks something inside you, and you sit, at a bedside, the roaches gathering patiently, and you wait for what is coming.

Nathan Ballingrud is an American writer of horror and dark fantasy. His first book, the short story collection North American Lake Monsters, was published in 2013 by Small Beer Press to great acclaim, including winning the Shirley Jackson Award and being shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter.

TC Book Review: J David Osborne Carves Deep and Dark into Rural Noir with Arresting Second Novel 'Low Down Death Right Easy'

Good Noir can come from anywhere, and from anyone. I’m talking GOOD Noir, now, not some half slung hash, over-spiced with reheated Chandler cliches and goopy private eyes.

Good Noir comes from J David Osborne, possibly without even him knowing it. Because he’s such a natural, unaffected writer, he probably has no idea that his not just hard boiled, but hard scrabble stories are imbued with the essence of Noir – that life altering darkness which creeps up from the interchangeable ground to squelch even the most optimistic character or sub-plot. Some writers just write dark, married to it on a cellular level and unable to escape that particular minor key. A singer can’t change the voice that bubbles up the esophagus when the vocal chords start to hum. Writers are like that. J David Osborne is like that.

In what will someday make one hell of an NPR interview, Osborne hails from the flatlands of Norman, Oklahoma, performs hip hop, hangs with Bizarros, and pens some of the most refreshingly original and fully mature stories that I've recently read, all without yet crossing over into his third decade. I say “mature” not in that school marmish, ratings board sort of way, but as a vehicle to describe his well-formed, lived-in prose, stripped away of showy trappings of a young writer eager to show off all that dime store plumage. “Full grown,” as John Spencer once sang.

Osborne writes older than he is, meaner than he is, maybe even leaner. His style is post-Weird and rural Beat, influenced by Dirty South dubs instead of Harlem jazz, set in septic backwaters rather than humming capitals of culture. Patient minimalism is dotted by blooms of true poetry, with acres of arable subtext filling in the blanks. He brings home along with him, as the grit of Oklahoma clay country courses through his ink, tinging all that black with a measure of red. And just when you think everything more or less makes sense, here comes the slider, cutting sharp and inside, to back you off of the plate.

With his second novel, Low Down Death Right Easy (Swallowdown Press, 2013), Osborne once again reaches out into the scabrous hinterlands of landlocked nowhere to unveil an intertwined collection of reluctant dreamers and three time losers, all trying to get by while navigating the rusted out refuse of the American Dream gone rancid. His sidewalks aren't cutting through Manhattan, but just as gritty and choked with weeds, leading past convenience store ice heads and rundown bars on out to the end of town, where “suburban” means greasy double wides and ATV tracks. Strange, brutal, yet disturbingly familiar, this is the sort of story you can taste on the back of your tongue like a hangover that stretches into nightfall, and makes you appreciate every last clean and hopeful thing you have in your life.

The familiarity stems from his diverse cast of characters of varying races tight-roping that narrow rung between working class and barely working poor, and those who work all of them over. The kind of New Heartland Americans who fish for their dinner, in between trips to KFC, after shopping at the newly erected Big Box monstrosity that grew up like a sowthistle over the last bones of Local Color left in a thousand small cities doting the less cluttered parts of the map. Hovering over all this meat and posturing is a fragility that lends a sadness to the day-to-day routine, the explosive howls of violence, the slow ride in the mud caked pickup truck after another failed job interview. The right thing is right in front of you, but the wrong thing is even closer, and doesn't demand that you bend down to get it.

That spine of Low Down Death Right Easy is the vertebra of brotherhood, as we follow the sometimes interconnected lives of two sets of brothers. Everyone crosses paths in a small town, and in an Osborne story, that doesn't usually end well. In a series of short, punchy chapters that structure the book, we are introduced to the lead character Danny Ames, who is looking for his missing brother, when not dealing with his mother’s worry and the local knuckleheads at the flypaper raver club where he works muscle, which gives the IRS a distraction away from his similarly heavy fisted after-hours gig. I've told Osborne that I think Danny deserves his own line of books, a la Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, and I meant it. Ames is that fascinating a figure - the sort of person who changes the air of a room when he walks into it, no matter how low key they are attempting to be. He’s just one of Those Guys. You can’t take your eyes off of Danny Ames, even when you can’t actually see him. The other pair of siblings are Sepp and Arlo Clancy, the latter married and the former adrift in that transitional haze of youth abutting the bleak reality of limited options and the immovable criminal justice system, who give readers a more domesticated side of this world, yet both struggle with keeping their heads screwed on straight. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as the distractions of the low road pop up everywhere. And the catfish pond is never too far away.

When I read Osborne’s writing, first introduced to me through his award winning debut novel - the gulag nightmare By The Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends - I have the sneaking suspicion deep in my marrow that we’re witnessing the foundational bricks of an Important Career. Osborne would probably snicker at this, then take of sip of his warming can of beer, look off into the flat horizon, and see something that none of the rest of us ever will. Those with that sort of sight, shaded by the darkness, by that Noir that is waiting for us in even the most brightly lit corners of life, are the writers I want to read. And so I will.

J David Osborne lives in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and dog. He is the author of the Wonderland Award-winning BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE'LL BE FRIENDS and LOW DOWN DEATH RIGHT EASY. He is currently writing the free, online pulp serial GOD$ FARE NO BETTER, which can be found at jdavidosborne.com. He is also the editor of the brand-new crime fiction imprint Broken River Books, and would love to see your best stuff at brokenriverbooks@gmail.com.

TC Book Review: By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends, a Novel by J. David Osborne

J. David Osborne is a thief, a liar, and a drug addict.  And, he's almost certainly insane.

I say this not because I want to disparage a fellow writer, or get dragged through libel proceedings, but because there is no other rational explanation for how Osborne wrote By the Time we Leave Here, We'll Be Friends (Swallowdown Press, 2010), a brutal, sometimes surreal tale set within a Soviet gulag, with such an unsettling incisiveness and an insider's verve.  It's as if he's trudged the Siberian wastes of plasticine snow, and lived behind that black widow's web of barbed wire.  He's tasted the chemicals and smelled the stink of trapped death, while facing down unending damnation inside a drape of junked out veins and tattooed skin.

He must have.  There's no other explanation otherwise.

Maybe he's Alek Karriker, a Muscovite con turned camp employee, who courts daily death for being a traitor to his kind - a scabrous collection of petty thieves, rapists, murderers, and muscle for the Russian mafia - while contemplating the strange writing that appears on his walls through a hazy veil of opium smoke. The man with a secret inside of his neck.

Or maybe he's Ilya Bogrov, the socially challenged sociopath and bathing enthusiast, who floats through the gulag barracks, weaving through pockets of startling violence and camp politics like a deadly ghost, hiding his forehead from the world while biding his time, looking for a trail over the tundra. 

Or he could be the hapless Pole Hipolit, passed around like a powergrab fucktoy, looking for a heart that had been removed long before he was sentenced to a living death inside a frozen prison melting under the weight of the monsters who inhabit it.

Or, perhaps he's old Anton Nikitin, the kindly guard, who only pines for time to read his paperbacks and to marvel at the wonder of the canine mind.

Or maybe he's Tatyana, Nikitin's German Shepherd, obsessed with digging a hole into the permafrost to find what lies beneath.

Or, in the end, maybe he's the calf, or the wolf that walks beside it, keeping its burning eyes on the prize... Maybe we're all calves, waiting for our invite to dinner...

It's hard to know who or what Osborne is, to craft such characters doing such things from so far away; or who we become as readers, when the cold and the drugs and the violence and chewingchewingchewing of sharpened teeth through masticated bread begin to spit-scatter our memories of a warm, free life like the blowing ash of burning, meatless skeletons.  Snowflakes of atrocity, mixing with the ice, digging down into the earth.

We'll never know who he really is, or was, as J. David Osborne tells us that he's a twentysomething living in Norman, Oklahoma, rapidly building a career as one of the finest Bizarro writers of his generation.  Hiding in plain sight, like a Soviet spy.   A Cold War never thaws, no matter how much heat is applied...

Whoever he is, Osborne writes with the restrained punch of a barroom brawler adept in secretive martial arts.  Garrulous haymakers peppered with quick, damaging blows, economically targeting the organs, taking out a joint, locking up a victim just long enough to smile in his face before flicking his cigarette and delivering a head butt.

His prose is like a 12 gauge blast of icy rock salt, flecked with gravel and forgotten bones, unloaded into your grill at point blank range. It won't kill you, but it'll cut you down, tear off that first layer of skin, letting you remember how it felt.  As you lay on the ground, tasting your own blood and wondering just what the fuck just hit you, you feel a hand on your shoulder, helping you up and leading you back to the card game inside.  Back into the warmth and the sweat and the stink and the glaring eyes.  It's not time to die alone in the cold.  There will be plenty of time for that later.  Right now, we drink and burn opium.  Plenty of time...

Chapters in the book are broken down into mini-scenes, almost vignettes, adding to the claustrophobia of the read and characters, suffocating amid the wide open tundra under prison gray skies.

Stand out sections among these are "Dead Cow Eye" and "Whale," which serve as sizzling plates of some of the best modern Weird fiction I've read in quite some time.

Osborne has a gift that he doesn't present like a preening peacock.  He measures his poetry, leafing it in amongst the grit and grime like a patient painter.  It's a strong, confident style, made all the more amazing by the fact that By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends is his debut novel.  This bodes well for writer and us readers alike, as he is currently working on his follow-up.  One can only wonder what he has in store for us next time; where he'll take us, and who won't be coming back.

I'm still mulling over the ending, as it threw me for a loop (and judging from the Afterword by Swallowdown Press head honcho Jeremy Robert Johnson, I wasn't the only one).  Perhaps I'll read the book again, running from the sun and back to Siberia.  The first soul in history who willingly returned to the gulag, filled with the the zeks and vors, the urkis and the sukas, all gathering around a battered furnace like shark-toothed moths, eying the history on each others' skin, looking for clues, looking for a weakness, looking for a way to pass the time before they die.

I don't know if By the Time we Leave Here, We'll Be Friends is Bizarro, The New Weird, speculative fiction, or what.  I'm not that intelligent or well versed in the minutiae of genre labels to make this sort of determination.  Nor do I care.  What I do know is that this book, Osborne's first, is easily one of the best I've read this year, if not the last several. 

So, in the end, perhaps J. David Osborne isn't a thief, a liar, or a drug addict, as all three pursuits are terribly time consuming, allowing little free time to write exceptional books.  And perhaps he is totally sane, allowing him to contemplate insanity in a way that can be terrifying, because HE is terrified by what he sees and what can be.  What has already been.  Crazy don't scare, you see... I don't know.  It's just a theory.  I'm still working over that ending...

What I do know is that J. David Osborne is on the come - or hell, maybe even already arrived.  A young Titan poised to stand at full height and cast his shadow over the muttering landscape that none will be able to ignore.  He's a force, and I can't wait to see where he takes us next, and what friends and corpses will be waiting for us when we get there.

JDO - Moonlighting as an Abercrombie model when not gashing his name into the annals of the Weird fiction canon

(By the Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends features an amazing cover by renowned artist Alex Pardee, is published by Jeremy Robert Johnson's Swallowdown Press, and is available all over the innerwebs, including at Goodreads here, as well as Amazon a little to the left, meaning right here.  You can find J. David's blog roundabout here).