This was an outlier, an exception, albeit an excruciating one. No matter the cause they had one thing in common, they were causes that lacked agency, that weren’t contagious, and certainly had nothing to do with the fundamental commitments of our entire society. Violent video games, bullying, and maybe some depression or other mental instability were (almost immediately) blamed. Moral Fragility and the Compulsion of Scapegoating And what seemed like an earth-shattering existential crisis in which we doubted the goodness of the world, quickly became something entirely different. You could smell the flowers from the parking lot over a hundred yards from the hill. In the days after the shooting my friends and I sat on the infamous hill above the school on which crosses for each of the victims had been placed and outpourings of grief and anguish scattered on every square inch of open space. I had performed in their auditorium just a couple of months earlier as part of a community choir and had set up risers with the stage manager, one of the shooters who seemed kind and helpful. I had friends at Columbine, hiding in adjacent rooms. 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.My first experience of this shattering of innocence came in the immediate wake of the execution of twelve students and a teacher and the subsequent suicides of the perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, on Apat Columbine High School. Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. 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). “One of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” - The Washington PostĪ 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). “Stretch the boundaries of the genre.It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” - The New York Times

The wounded storyteller summary