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.
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 harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’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.
I recently read an interview with Ballingrud where he described this book as The Martian Chronicles crossed with True Grit, and it’s a very accurate comparison.
I picked up this book solely based on the buzz, and had no idea what it was about, or anything. I actually tend to enjoy going into a book cold. But sometimes, I do feel a bit off kilter, having not read anything beforehand about the book.
That was the case here, when it opened up, and there were a couple of mentions that I thought…well, that doesn’t sound like it’s realistic…until I clued in that we were on Mars, but 90 years ago. And Mars had been visited for something like 60 years prior to that. Okay, cool. Offbeat, but I can get behind it.
I’m not really a fan of westerns, for the most part, but I actually really enjoy when someone takes that genre, and slathers another genre over it, in this case, some science fiction, but also a healthy dollop of horror as well.
The SF was fine. It was enough to suspend disbelief that we’d somehow made it to Mars back in the 1800s. But I did enjoy the horror aspect of…well, the Strange in The Strange…quite a bit. The fact that it can work its way into both the engines (the robots with a lot of personality in the novel), as well as the humans was far more effective than the other novel I read recently that explored a similar theme, T. Kingfisher’s What Moves The Dead. More effective, I believe, because Ballingrud was less concerned with explaining it too much, and more concerned with making it creepy.
And yes, it got creepy.
And to be honest, I really enjoyed the ride. Ballingrud does an excellent job of dropping you right into the hard-bitten world of Mars, now cut off from contact with Earth. He also does a good job of paying homage to a lot of the influences on the novel, but most especially Ray Bradbury, Charles Portis, and Larry McMurtry.
The only reason I wouldn’t give The Strange a perfect score is because I felt the story touched on some interesting things (that I won’t spoil here, but they start showing up halfway through and, once we get to know more about the effects of the Strange, they come more and more toward the end) that didn’t really get fully explored, that I think would have given the ending a bit more of a point. I know I said earlier that I enjoyed the more non-explanative aspects of the book, and I stand by that. It’s more, hey, you gave us a glimpse of this, but I wanted a better look. Which is good, because Ballingrud was piquing my interest throughout.
And finally, I just felt that the ending sort of…happened, with not a lot of agency or understanding by the characters. Might just be me, as everyone else seems to dig it. But I guess I just wanted a bit more of a point to it all.
But for all of that, it’s still an excellent, entertaining read.
