In his first short story collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined. This Spring, readers will once again be drawn into the mind of this heavyweight horror writer when Saga Press publishes Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell (April 9th).

Wounds, chock full of entrancing, gripping, and utterly terrifying stories, includes the novella, “The Visible Filth,” which unravels the eerie dread that descends upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight. The story has been adapted into a feature film; Wounds, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and stars Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, and Zazie Beetz. In “The Butchers Table,” a diabolist and his bodyguard search for the map of Hell, in “The Maw” a city lost to supernatural creatures, while “The Diabolist” abounds with the metaphysical and monsters.

Following the success of North-American Lake Monsters, Wounds contains beautifully crafted stories that are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts in 1970, but spent most of his life in the South. He studied literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of New Orleans. Among other things, he has been a cook on oil rigs and barges, a waiter, and a bartender in New Orleans. His fiction has been awarded the Shirley Jackson Award, and he has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.