The Strange

Ballingrud's novel length debut is not 'bad', so to say, but the story failed to connect with me. I can't fully point at what the problem was -- it might have been the fictional 1930s Mars, which was obviously a fake construct -- a cross between Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Western movies and a bunch of other stuff.

After some time, I started to notice it simply didn't engage me. I didn't care about what happened to the characters, and I wasn't interested in the world building either. I stopped reading at 55%. It might have been the prose -- somehow it seemed devoid of a soul. In all fairness, this got high praise elsewhere, amongst others from Speculiction.

I still have high hopes for Ballingrud's short story collection North American Lake Monsters though. The short form seems better suited for his kind of fantastica -- for this particular reader at least.