Screen to Scream: North American Lake Monsters and Monsterland

 Some people prefer their horror to be all about extremes, visceral, gory, taboo-breaking extremes. More like heavy metal concerts from the back of Halloween stores, this view of horror, often pegged into the splatterpunk or extreme horror genres, wants to go right for the reader’s jugular or take a sledgehammer to the reader’s brainpan. Those new to horror might even think that this extreme horror encapsulates all of horror, but horror, like other genres, is a spectrum. One of the subtle differences between horror subgenres is the level of violence. There is actually some horror that relies not on dismemberment but disquiet. Disquiet horror relies more on making the reader uncomfortable rather than outright offending their sensibilities. If splatterpunk is heavy metal, then disquiet horror is classical music where the violin strings are the reader’s taut nerve endings. Writer Nathan Ballingrud may be one those writers whose name will become synonymous with disquiet horror, particularly since he has not only a collection of short stories, North American Lake Monsters, that all feature these kinds of slow burn stories, but this collection has also influenced a series on Hulu called Monsterland.

Monsterland is a unique limited series on Hulu in that it’s an anthology series. There are eight unique supernatural horror stories, each with a title denoting a particular US city. Some of those stories are even connected, particularly those that were created by Ballingrud for the series. So at least some of the stories in this series all share one story universe, a universe where mermaids are both an amazing catch and an omen of doom and where getting away from your problems is as easy as slipping off your skin, metaphorically and literally. In Ballingrud’s horror universe, these cities can be just as much of a character as the people who inhabit them, particularly those that take place in Louisiana. Much like in the Hulu movie Wounds, which is also based on Ballingrud's work, New Orleans is both vibrant and dark and as distinctive from other cities as the monsters, both human and supernatural, are distinctive from their victims.

The stories in North American Lake Monsters have some differences from Monsterland, even those that directly inspired specific episodes. Readers looking for some great examples of quiet horror should experience both the book and the series. Reading the fiction that inspired them, the supernatural monsters in this world often pale in evil to the all too human ones, and that can be more horrifying. At least, a vampire or skin-wearing monster is evil because that is its nature, specifically made to terrorize humanity. Humans being terrible to each other destroys the illusion that we are intrinsically better than any evil we will face. The characters in Ballingrud’s fiction voice some dark ideas and make terrible decisions that seem okay in the short term. In other words, they’re allowed to be just human enough to move down the slippery slope into depravity. With the goal of quiet horror being to make the reader uncomfortable, perhaps even nauseous from the circumstances it described, Nathan Ballingrud is set to corner the market on quiet horror.