"The Strange" by Nathan Ballingrud is a captivating science fiction and fantasy novel set on Mars. The story revolves around Anabelle Crisp, a fourteen-year-old girl living on Mars, who experiences the Silence, cutting off all communication between Earth and Mars. When she and her father are robbed, the thieves steal a recording of her absent mother's voice. Driven by determination and a desire to lift her father's spirits, Anabelle embarks on a quest to confront the thieves and retrieve the precious recording.

Reviewed on my blog:
http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2023/05/recent-reading-strange-by-nathan.html

This was an OK read. I think i expected a bit more with the true Grit in space tag line. A bit more action maybe. but it was ok

👩‍🚀 the strange by nathan ballingrud 👩‍🚀

I’ve never read any of the author’s other work so I was going into this with totally new eyes. It started off exciting but fell off quite quickly. I loved how it was written as though it was the 1950/60s. It was quite cool. Even though it wasn’t necessarily for me I have recommended it to friends I think would really enjoy it.

Lines i like:

“Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking, too, about old friends and old enemies, about how sometimes they were the same people.”

“I guess I just wanted to get a close up view of what a wasted life looks like.”

Essentially it is True Grit on Mars, but it lacks the humour that makes True Grit special.

Annabelle and her father run a diner on the first official Mars colony, New Galveston, but find themselves the target of a robbery with supplies dwindling since they lost contact with Earth more than a year prior. Ballingrud sets up his novel excellently with truly brilliant world building and mystery making.

As things progress through, I found the monotone of the novel difficult to keep returning to and felt whatever emotional resonance built up in the early dissipated the further things went and the less sense it all seemed to make.

I was excited about this and initially impressed, but it lacked a variation of tone and substance as we followed Annabelle to the deeper reaches of Mars. I'll probably need to dig into the his horror stories for a fairer comparison of his work.

What a fun and captivating, out-of-this-world read this turned out to be.

This book is called The Strange and as the title suggests, this is a very strange yet hypnotizing story.
Events play out in a Martian world, colonised by human settlers with a dystopian timeline unlike our own. As the story progresses the reader will encounter many strange and fascinating events and entities, including the titular Strange. You will have to read this to find out about that though.
To me, this book was a real breath of fresh air. It has all the elements you would want from a science fiction novel, along with plenty of elements which you wouldn't necessarily expect.

The story follows the scintillating adventures of Annabell, a rather headstrong and larger-than-life young girl. She has all the traits you would assume a young girl would have, yet she is so much more than that. My thoughts on her varied throughout my reading experience. One moment I would feel caringly towards her or feel some kind of pity for the situations she finds herself in. Yet within a few more pages of reading, I would maybe feel something closing in on hatred for her but when thinking back to my youth, things were far more black and white than they appear later on in life. I loved this story having such a conflicted and multifaceted main character

To me, this felt like a cross between a regular science fiction novel and a frontier western, with plenty of curious and supernatural elements thrown in for good measure. I loved this mix of influences, it felt fresh compared to the majority of science fiction I have read recently and kept me on my toes and trying to anticipate what would happen next.
The writing was brilliantly descriptive and kept to a very pleasant pace from start to finish. The overall reading experience was very rewarding and enjoyable with a good balance between action, dialogue, really well-drawn characters and a great knack for telling an extremely enjoyable and multilayered story.

Strange by name, even stranger by nature. Highly recommended!

The Strange was my fascinating introduction to Nathan Ballingrud, who is particularly well known for his weird, dark fantasy and horror short stories brought together in the two collections North American Lake Monsters (2013) and Wounds (2019). In 2007 his short story ‘The Monsters of Heaven’ won the prestigious Shirley Jackson Award, with him winning a second Jackson gong in 2013 for North American Lake Monsters, in the Best Single-Author Short Story Collection category. Ballingrud’s widely admired fiction has also been nominated for numerous other top prizes, included the Bram Stoker, the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award.

Back in 2015 Ballingrud’s novella The Visible Filth (currently out of print) was included in the excellent This is Horror website fiction range, with The Strange being his longest work to date and his debut as a novelist. The Strange was a very appropriate title for a book which was indeed very strange! I also found it to be a very quiet, poetic, and a rather oddly moving experience. It was as much science fiction as it was horror, even if there was little in the way of ‘science’ or wider explanation in the book of how things ticked. It had an overwhelming feeling of decay, resources were low, technology was breaking down and not being replenished. Lots of other reviews have made comparisons with Ray Bradbury (and quite right too) but it also reminded me of the cult Richard Stanley film Hardware (1990) which is also full of technology scavengers and a battle for the last remaining resources.

Although The Strange is undoubtedly being marketed as a horror science fiction crossover novel, it fits into the Weird Western genre just as comfortable as those two more mainstream genres. The plot structure echoes the 1968 western novel True Grit by Charles Portis, made famous by two Hollywood films, the major difference being there is no Rooster Cockburn style character in this book, but feisty teenager Annabelle Crisp would make a fine Mattis Ross. Instead of revenge, Belle is attempting to recover a tube which holds a recording of her mother who recently returned to Earth. The barren and desolate Martian landscapes were beautifully described, with outlying lawless settlements, and it was easy to compare this with the rugged American West of pioneer times.

The story opens with Belle working at her father’s diner in New Galveston the main colony on Mars, which nostalgically recreates the feeling of Earth with pictures adorning the walls, when a man comes in just before closing time. He is aggressive and confrontational, after ordering coffee he and his gang rob the diner. In the course of the robbery her most prized possession is also taken, the last connection with her absent mother. And she will do anything to get it back, even if the local sheriff is too fearful to cross the outlaws.

Throbbing in the background is this overwhelmingly deep sense of isolation. Since Bella’s mother returned to Earth there has been a breakdown in communication with home and readers will have fun reading between the lines over what might have happened or understanding the force behind it. Is the Mars colony perhaps now being seen as a failed experiment or has there been a catastrophic event on Earth which has caused the deafening silence? The story cleverly balances the idealistic longing to return ‘home’ with what it means to actually be ‘Martian’. Again if you read between the lines most colonists were probably running from something on Earth, with Bella living on the red planet since she was a small child.

Along the way The Strange has an array of colourful characters who either help or hinder Bella recover her recording. Add into the mix other fascinating story strands involving ghosts, hallucinations, robots (the kitchen robot ‘Watson’ was very cool) breaking their programming and evolving, throw in kickstarting ancient, busted spacecrafts and there is a lot to savour and enjoy. Threaded throughout is a deep sense of melancholia with Bella telling the story reflectively from some point in the future. This mood was reminiscent of Michel Faber’s science fiction masterpiece The Book of Strange New Things which also concerns trying to contact Earth from millions of miles away.

Bizarrely, The Strange is also set in the past with an alternate historical timeline and although this was odd within the constraints of the story it worked perfectly well, some readers might find the lack of detail frustrating, but I loved this retro-futurism style. And what of ‘The Strange’ itself? I’ve kept that to near the end as I’m not entirely certain how to explain this phenomenon and it could also have done with a tad more clarity, a mineral peculiar to Mars which seems to be growing a conscience and changing or evolving people and technology (think robots). Creating genuine Martians perhaps? Bella was a great character, and although she comes across as older than the probably was, carried the book in some style.

There was a lot going on in The Strange, which was a clever mashup covering several genres carried by a sense of childhood longing, family ideals and a credible leading character trying to hold onto her identity in a world which was changing in ways nobody could fathom. I found the dustbowl of Mars and the broken-down settlements to be totally captivating and absorbing, but I would not want to live there!

The Strange is the second great Weird Western I have read this year (and it is only February) but the only one set on a Mars that could have been created by Ray Bradbury. The moment I read this book was a cross between Bradbury's Mars and Charles Portis's True Grit (suggested by Karen Joy Fowler no less) I knew I would be joining in the adventures on the Red Planet. Annabelle Crisp works at hers father's diner, missing her Mother who traveled back to earth mere months before all contact between the planets ceased. All Annabelle has left of her mother is a recording, and when that valuable possession gets stolen in a robbery it drives Annabelle to a dangerous decision, she, along with a motley crew that includes her Kitchen Aide robot Watson, are going to do what the local sheriff wont do and go after the bandits. This is only the start of the wild ride. I am predicting that The Strange will be in my top reads of 2023.