The Visible Filth

“[Ballingrud's] evocative and strangely beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award–winning author of The Changeling “Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and Borne “Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” —The New York Times “In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” —The Washington Post “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—The New York Review of Books “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory.”—Hellnotes “Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—New York Journal of Books “There’s enough nightmare fuel here to inspire weeks of insomnia — all told with an even hand with a penchant for precise storytelling. How else do you chart the furthest reaches of the uncanny?”—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A gripping collection of six stories of terror—including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture—by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado—“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

“Elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.” —Victor LaValle, award-winning author of The Changeling This gripping novella of terror by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud is the basis for the film Wounds starring Dakota Johnson, Armie Hammer, and Zazie Beetz! An eerie dread descends upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in the novella “The Visible Filth,” which has been adapted for film by director Babak Anvari—premiering at the Sundance film festival!—and starring Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, and Zazie Beetz. Wounds will release on April 12th, 2019.

Suitable only for persons of strong constitution. Contains: Drug use Perversion Murder Corruption Sexism Racism Law Enforcement And a tapeworm

Nathan Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible. These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape. Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

The tiers are shifting. The omniverses are under attack. And only one man has the chromosomes to make things right. Or does he? Filthy Frank begins life as the harmless creator of extinction level radioactive weapons, but is taken far into the deepest recesses of the omniverses to learn how everything came to be and how everything will be. If it were only that simple. He and his group of deviant disciples are chased from realm to realm by murderous chimpillas and treacherous peace lords, as he seeks to understand the dark secrets of the omniverses. An encounter with the Ultimate God might be his only chance, but Frank must first survive not only those who fight for evil but his own struggle for good as well. If only his chromosomes would stop multiplying...

The New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box returns with a supernatural thriller of love, redemption, and murder. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NEWSWEEK “This one haunts you for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. . . . [Josh Malerman] defies categories and comparisons with other writers.”—Kirkus Reviews Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times . . . but her many deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days. Only two people know of Carol’s eerie condition. One is her husband, Dwight, who married Carol for her fortune, and—when she lapses into another coma—plots to seize it by proclaiming her dead and quickly burying her . . . alive. The other is her lost love, the infamous outlaw James Moxie. When word of Carol’s dreadful fate reaches him, Moxie rides the Trail again to save his beloved from an early, unnatural grave. And all the while, awake and aware, Carol fights to free herself from the crippling darkness that binds her—summoning her own fierce will to survive. As the players in this drama of life and death fight to decide her fate, Carol must in the end battle to save herself. The haunting story of a woman literally bringing herself back from the dead, Unbury Carol is a twisted take on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page. Praise for Unbury Carol “Fantastically clever. A breakneck ride to save a life already lost, proving sometimes death is only the beginning.”—J. D. Barker, internationally bestselling author of The Fourth Monkey “Breathtaking and menacing . . . an intricately plotted, lyrical page-turner about love, betrayal, revenge, and the primal fear of being buried alive.”—Booklist (starred review) “Unbury Carol is a Poe story set in the weird West we all carry inside us, and it not only hits the ground running, it digs into that ground, too. About six wonderful feet.”—Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels “Bleakly lyrical à la Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor.”—Library Journal (starred review) “With vivid prose and characters that leap off the page, guns a-blazing, Unbury Carol creates its own lingering legend, dragging you along like an obstinate horse toward a righteous storm of an ending.”—Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma

Focusing on 'filth' in literary & cultural materials from London, Paris & their colonial outposts in the 19th & early 20th centuries, the essays in this volume range over topics from the building of sewers to the fictional representation of labouring women as polluting.

"Five of us sat in a circle doing our best to emulate the girls in The Craft, hoping to unleash some power to take us all away from our home to the place of our dreams. But we weren't witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school."One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It's all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors. Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely-smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it's a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it's something else-something far more ancient and powerful. As Father Moreno's obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her "bruja Craft crew" and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.