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.
Nathan Ballingrud's stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and
the Hulu series Monsterland, The Strange is his first novel.
