The Strange
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4.2 • 10 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
“Stretches the boundaries of the genre.” —The New York Times
1931, New Galveston, Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance in this “page-turner” (Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun) from Nathan Ballingrud.
Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher, as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.
At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harsher realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud’s “brilliant” (Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World) novel is haunting in its evocation of Annabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.
Nathan Ballingrud’s stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and the Hulu series Monsterland, The Strange is his first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ballingrud (Wounds) explores how isolation can lead to desperation in this ambitious but not wholly successful speculative horror novel set in an alternate 1930s wherein humanity has already achieved multiple permanent settlements on Mars. It's an exciting premise, but Ballingrud doesn't do much with it; despite the specificity of the alternate timeline, this shares an aesthetic with countless other generic space westerns. When contact between Mars and Earth is abruptly cut off, panic sets in among the Martian settlers. People supposedly afflicted with madness caused by a mineral ore known as the Strange ransack Anabelle Crisp's family's restaurant and assault 14-year-old Anabelle and her father, Samuel. Samuel kills one of the assailants and is arrested for murder, sending a furious Anabelle on a quest for both vengeance and the return of recordings of her earthbound mother's voice, taken in the robbery. Traveling with her across the Martian deserts are Watson, her robot dishwasher friend; Sally Milkwood, an outlaw supply runner; and Joe Reilly, an Earth-to-Mars pilot turned town drunk. While their perilous journey is suspenseful, and unraveling the horrible secrets of the Strange makes a fascinating mystery, the unsatisfactory conclusion leaves more questions than it answers. Readers will put this down being more frustrated than fulfilled.
