![]() ![]() ![]() Mars is the real hero of “The Strange,” and it is not easily forgotten. Anabelle is less satisfying as a protagonist her lack of experience, cockiness and bad decision-making inexplicably inspire loyalty from the novel’s far more interesting secondary cast of desperate frontier men and women. The eerie Martian setting and its feral frontier communities play to all of Ballingrud’s strengths and will evoke feelings of genuine awe and terror. There, 14-year-old Anabelle Crisp embarks on a dangerous journey to retrieve a voice recording of her mother, who left Mars on the last transport ship to Earth. Set in an alternate historical timeline in which Mars was colonized in the late 19th century, “The Strange” transports readers to a Martian settlement in 1931 that had contact with Earth several years earlier. ![]() Nathan Ballingrud has gifted us with two of the finest collections of short horror fiction in the last 10 years - “North American Lake Monsters” and “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell” - so expectations are perhaps preternaturally high for “The Strange,” his first novel. ![]()
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