Nick Cave, post-punk’s self-styled dark prince, has long walked the razor’s edge between balladry and literature. Beginning as early as 1983 with the release of The Birthday Party’s “The Bad Seed” EP, which featured the song “Swampland,” whose mad visionary of a narrator prefigures Euchrid Euchrow, the central character in Cave’s not unaccomplished 1989 Southern gothic pastiche And the Ass Saw the Angel, and continuing with The Bad Seeds’ moody, heroin-haunted fourth and fifth albums, “Your Funeral, My Trial” (1986) and “Tender Prey,” (1988) that showcase, respectively, tales of moribund, carnival nags and convicted killers who may or may not be innocent, and finally culminating in 1996’s ferociously brilliant “Murder Ballads,” in many ways a collection of revisionist short fiction set to symphonic musical arrangements-think Henry Lawson meets Cormac McCarthy by way of Vachel Lindsay-Cave, preeminently a lyricist, has always harbored the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of a novelist.