Nathan Ballingrud has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 33 ratings. The most-rated is Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 3.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 3
Summary
It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic. “So Sings the Siren”, by Annie Neugebauer, takes us onto a dark fantasy stage for a one-night-only performance of mythological torture. Ryan Harding’s “Junk” gets right to the hardcore stuff with the ultimate dick-pic horror tale. Robert Levy’s “The Cenacle” is a literary cemetery feast you may have a hard time stomaching (Tums won’t save you). Luciano Marano made his first pro sell when he sold “Burnt” to DOA III, and the tale has its own fiery fetishistic twist. Tim Waggoner’s “Til Death” is Lovecraftian post-apocalypse horror at its absolute best. “Letter from Hell” comes with that special delivery you only get from Matt Shaw. Dani Brown gets down and very dirty in her “Theatrum Mortuum”, which may be the most extreme thing you hear all year. In “Bernadette”, Ramiro Perez de Pereda gets medieval in his tale of a djinn summoned by a desperate priest. Brian Hodge takes you on a trip to Mexico you will never forget in “West of Matamoros, North of Hell”. Bracken MacLeod’s “Reprising Her Role” takes us behind the scenes of a porno snuff film for a gut-wrenching reprisal and unexpected bonus footage. A real-life death threat inspired Doug Ford’s “The Watcher”, and we think it shows. “Scratching from the Outer Darkness” showcases Tim Curran’s descriptive prowess and gives you a tale of hardcore Cthulhu mythos. Brace yourself when Adam Howe’s “Foreign Bodies” takes you deep into the bowels of a nasty abyss. Sean Patrick Hazlett introduces us to “Adramelech”, an ancient demon with a taste for broiled children. Scott Smith (A Simple Plan and The Ruins) wraps up this year’s fat package of the hard stuff in a big bloody bow with “The Dogs”. The canines in this tale are not "man’s best friend" variety, nor are they woman’s besties, as you will see. And many more! Thanks for coming along into this year’s heart of hardcore darkness. We hope to see you on the other side.
©2018 Comet Press (P)2018 Comet Press
North American Lake Monsters
Summary
In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves. Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, or ex-wives, and sometimes they wear the faces we see in our mirrors. The people in these stories - ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids seduced by extremism - are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they’re ruined; sometimes redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, and terrifyingly human. Even at their most monstrous.
©2013 Nathan Ballingrud (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Nameless Dark
Summary
The Nameless Dark debuts a major new voice in contemporary weird fiction. Within these minutes, you'll find whispers of the familiar ghosts of the classic pulps - Lovecraft, Bradbury, Smith - blended with Grau's uniquely macabre, witty storytelling, securing his place at the table amid this current Renaissance of literary horror.
©2015 T.E. Grau (P)2016 Lethe Press
Wounds
Summary
“Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre.... It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” (The New York Times) “One of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” (The Washington Post) 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.
©2019 Nathan Ballingrud (P)2019 Simon & Schuster