The Atlas of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud

The traveler is received at a local inn with courtesy and warmth. The fire in the hearth is raucous, the ovens hot. Conversations are robust. If the traveler does not have a coat, one is provided. If the traveler has no friend, strangers gather and offer their names. This is the condition of the Gloaming: warmth in the cold night, food and companionship in Hell’s rocky chain of mountains.

The wind which moves through the city emits from hundreds of fissures within the mountain, bringing peace and warmth to this isolate place. At the end of the mountain’s breath, however, there is a long pause, when the banners settle and the candle-flames stand straight.

The mountain begins to inhale, and Gloaming becomes a slaughterhouse.

The wind reverses course and moves inward, into the rock, at an increasing velocity. People are brought to their knees, staggering for shelter they will not find. The flesh is sloughed from their bodies in bloody sheets. Bones break. Some lurch about on snapped limbs. Buildings are ripped apart. The village becomes a bleeding wreckage and a fountain of wailing.

Within the Mountain That Breathes is a chamber housing a dozen captured angels - tiny flower-headed celestials, each orbited by rings of miniature worlds - imprisoned in silvered birdcages. When their long inhalation ends and they exhale again, the village is reconstituted, and the pilgrims of Hell return to this brief, sweet oasis.

From The Mountain That Breathes

This is the second collection of stories I’ve read by Nathan Ballingrud, after the excellent North American Lake Monsters, which was probably my favourite horror short story collection of the last 10 years, combining serious, granular everyday struggles to put food on the table with the added annoyance of the undead and cosmic horrors. The Atlas of Hell is the second publication of Nathan Ballingrud published by the New Ruins, an imprint of Dead Ink books.

The stories in The Atlas of Hell unsurprisingly convene around an occult instrument known as the Atlas of Hell, which is the decapitated head of a Black Iron monk; cartographers who walk the depths of hell in an attempt to map and describe its environs. They wear black iron cages around their head to protect them from the worst of the visual and spiritual horrors around them. The titular story comes first, and concerns small-time crooks with the help of an occultist who travel into the Louisiana swamp to steal the aforementioned artefact. The plot reminded me of Angel Heart in places, that overwhelming, oppressive humidity rendering every characters sweaty and half-drunk with lethargy and rum.

As a whole the stories sit somewhere between Southern Gothic crime stories and intense, visceral horror. There is a good deal of world building inside The Atlas of Hell, with most of the earthly stories staying within the confines of Louisiana as it follows various down-on-their luck nobodies making deals with people they shouldn’t. Three of the stories, The Atlas of Hell, The Maw and Visible Filth take part in contemporary society, or a future version, while The Diabolist and The Butcher’s Table consider the same region from years ago. Skullpocket is the only story from the original collection that focuses entirely on hell, and I think its the biggest bum note of the collection for me, being a little bit too twee and saccharine for what is objectively quite dark subject matter. It just gets the tone wrong.

Of the six full stories, The Maw and The Butcher’s Table are the two strongest for me, but The Atlas of Hell and Visible Filth were enjoyable too, the latter already having been made into a film. The Maw is an emotionally affecting story about one man’s grief at losing his dog during the end of the world. It portrays the apocalypse as something that just happens, and instead spends its time almost taking the carnage and destruction for granted while focusing on a person’s loneliness and determination to do something risky and stupid to try and find his best friend. I really enjoyed how a very grisly depiction of tall, skinny demons that stitched corpses together into foul jokes took a back seat to a guy determined to find his dog, told through the perspective of a jaded, fed up teenager paid to guide him through an opening into hell, told in a way that she thought of herself as a Deliveroo driver or something. One of the things I like about Balungrud, which you see again here in The Atlas of Hell, is the ability to pull emotions out of the reader beyond just fear and tension. There is genuine sadness and even some quiet, beautiful moments in this story.

The Butcher’s Table is the longest story in the collection, and concerns an occultist who hires a ship and crew to take him to meet a cannibal cult that live in the corpse of a fallen angel. Its equal parts caper and a slow inevitable drag into death. Most of the characters hold hidden agendas which come to light at various stages of the story. Everyone (bar maybe one character, and one you’d not expect) is incredibly self-interested and would happily see the person next to them take a bullet to save five minutes. It all builds into a reckoning with various factions of both earth and hell which was both satisfying while also as visceral as you might expect demons and angel corpses and cannibal cults to be.

There are also additional small two-page vignettes between each story that give a little extra insight into various parts of hell. The Mountain That Breathes is excellent, and offers a unique take on the sort of horror an environment like hell can create. In a way it reminded me of North American Lake Monsters in the sense that the horrific wasn’t necessarily evil or spiteful, but instead just something that exists in the world, like spiders or cancer. I didn’t really care for any of the other vignettes as most of what they talk about are already covered in the other short stories, and I think sometimes horror is better when it’s just hinted or looked at in the peripheral vision, rather than being described in exact terms. I understand these vignettes were added for the UK edition, and wonder if they were there merely as a way to try and offer something new.

In terms of presentation, mythology and subject matter this reminded me more than anything of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, which is one of my favourite short story collections. Plots, decisions (people only make bad decisions here), personalities and consequences all felt plausible and relatable within the world that Balungrud has built. The collection just felt a bit half-finished, like it needed another 2-3 stories to really bulk out what Balungrud’s interpretation of hell and its affect on humanity looks like. It was largely petty crimes and deals gone bad. I would have liked some wider perspectives, similar to what he created so deftly in his first collection.

The Atlas of Hell is available on paperback now through Dead Ink Books