"Pain has a rich and varied language, both mundane and transcendent, with infinite variations and many subtle flavours. Pain is one of the most private experiences people face, and yet a universal experience. North American Lake Monsters uses this palette to create most of its narrative hues and textures, to sharpen and heighten the characteristics of its profoundly human, deeply flawed characters. What sets this collection of short stories apart is the way the supernatural, magical and horrific are utilized like a light source, illuminating dark places while casting even deeper shadows. Ballingrud's writing is piercing and merciless, holding the lens steady through fear, rage and disgust, showing a weird kind of love to his subjects, in refusing to turn away, as well as an uncompromising pitilessness. Angels and vampires are placed next to lost white supremacist boys and burnt-out waitresses. All are equally, horribly ugly and real."
-Toronto Globe and Mail

"Each one of these nine stories has the capacity to seduce and terrify you like any of the most heavyweight horror authors out there."
-Andrew Liptak, io9

"Ballingrud's work isn't like any other. These stories are full of sadness and sorrow, but they're not merely sad. Like Tom Waits, Ballingrud is an expert at teasing out every delicious shade and nuance, every fine gradation of misery and pain. It's a heady and fantastic cocktail mixed from roughnecks and down-and-outers and flawed people who find in their ordinary and terrible world monsters, magic, and the strange. Ballingrud's fantastic elements are never seen full on, but always out of the corner of your eye, and it makes them all the more haunting."
-Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

"Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters is an exceptional fictional debut: It deserves a place alongside collections like Peter Straub's Magic Terror, Scott Wolven's Controlled Burn, Dan Chaon's Stay Awake, Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Like those works, Ballingrud's stories delve into the damaged psyches of American men, with a distinctly twenty-first-century awareness of the world we now inhabit, itself as damaged as the shellshocked figures that populate it. Ballingrud's tales are ostensibly tales of terror, meticulously constructed and almost claustrophobically understated in their depiction of an all- encompassing horror that, despite its often unearthly shimmer, is human rather than supernatural in origin; Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" or Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as reimagined by Robert Stone or Cormac McCarthy."
-Elizabeth Hand, F&SF

"Matched to his original ideas and refreshing re-furbishments of genre set pieces, Ballingrud's writ-ing makes North American Lake Monsters one of the best collections of short fiction for the year.
-Locus

"The beauty of the work as a whole is that it offers no clear and easy answers; any generalization that might be supported by some stories is contradicted by others. It makes for an intellectually stimulating collection that pulls the reader in unexpected directions. The pieces don't always come to a satisfactory resolution, but it is clear that this is a conscious choice. The lack of denouement, the uncertainty, is part of the fabric of the individual stories and of the collection as a whole. It is suggestive of a particular kind of world: one that is dark, weird, and just beyond our ability to impose order and understanding. These are not happy endings. They are sad and unsettling, but always beautifully written with skillful and insightful prose. It is a remarkable collection."
-Hellnotes

"Ballingrud's language transforms known quantities into monsters again. . . .
"Yo