A Facebook friend of mine recommended The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. My local library was able to get a copy via interlibrary loan, and I picked it up on Friday. Last night—Monday—I finished reading it.
It starts off a bit like True Grit[1]I’ve only seen the Coens’ version of the movie, but I’ve heard it hews pretty close to the Charles Portis novel. One day I’ll have to read it.—a rough-around-the-edges life in a frontier town, narrated by a thirteen-year-old girl. But it’s set on Mars. In 1931.
Anabelle Crisp, the narrator, lives in New Galveston. She works after school’s done at her dad’s diner. Her mom went back to Earth about a year ago, planning to return in short order; but before she could come back, all contact with Earth mysteriously ceased. They call it the Silence.
The diner is robbed one night, and the thieves make off with the last recording Anabelle and her father have from her mother. With the diner’s kitchen robot in tow, Anabelle sets off on a mission of revenge.
Along the way she meets the pilot who flew the last mission from Earth, a widow with her husband’s skeleton in her basement, cultists, miners, ghosts, war machines, and the first man to set foot on Mars[2]Sort of.. She learns what’s really happening at the mine where they harvest the substance called the Strange, which powers their intelligent robots. She learns a lot—a lot more than she wants to know—about Mars.
The Strange is a wild ride: True Grit × Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, with passages that reminded me of Stephen King’s descriptions of graphic violence. (Because this is also a violent book, at times.) There’s a lot of emotion in it, too, filtered through Anabelle’s anger, sorrow, and fear. The characters are deeply imperfect, all of them, and no one is safe.
This is Ballingrud’s first novel; having read it, I think I’m going to have to seek out some of his short fiction (though, from what I’ve read online, I think he might skew more horror than science-fantasy).
If you’re looking for a captivating, well-written, fast-paced, weird Western on Mars, I recommend The Strange.