Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.
It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.
But patients aren’t the only ones with trouble on their minds, and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.
I’m hoping to find a middle ground between longer blog reviews (which take me so much longer to write than you might expect) and Instagram caption reviews, which can feel incredibly confining.
And I feel like this is the perfect book to try something like that. Because while Nathan Ballingrud’s CRYPT OF THE SPIDER MOON comes in at just under 100 pages, this book fucking blew me away & I had BIG feelings about reading this.
This is the first in Ballingrud’s LUNAR GOTHIC trilogy & he manages to do something with this book that I think is incredibly rare: CRYPT OF THE SPIDER MOON is deeply, profoundly weird. But its weirdness never comes at the expense of the reader’s understanding of the story, or of the incredible amount of character development.
I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes it can feel like… with dark/weird fiction, I’m just muddling along, untethered from reality. Just…lost. And that’s one of my least favorite things when I’m reading. I never felt lost for even a bit reading CRYPT OF THE SPIDER MOON, even during its most bonkers moments.
The book is set in an alternate 1923, and we meet our main character, Veronica Brinkley, just as she her husband are about to touch down on the surface of the moon. Veronica is being admitted to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, which is about as in touch with sound mental health practices as you might imagine based on that name alone.
Let alone the fact that they “treat” patients by opening up their skulls, and adding in a bit of spider silk from the long-dead GIANT spider who once lived in a cave beneath the moon’s forest.
What could go wrong?
There’s a lot happening in this slim novella, for sure. There’s elements of sci-fi & of course plenty of horror. We even get a small sampling of crime fiction, via the backstory of a menacing orderly that Veronica nicknames Grub.
But there’s also a haunting sadness to this story that just gripped me from the start. Oof. This book is so wildly atmospheric, you’ll feel like you are also sitting by a water fountain, surrounded by a forest, and somehow just breathing the air on the surface of the moon.
The writing in this book is fucking breathtaking, and I continue to be in awe of Nathan Ballingrud’s talent. If you’ve read his most recent novel, THE STRANGE, you’re going to love CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER. This one is skewed much more towards horror than THE STRANGE (which has a western vibe), but I just love the sort of retro-futurism vibe of both books, set in the 1920’s-1930’s, and humans are just casually walking around on Mars or the moon.
This was incredible, one of my favorite reads of the year! Massive thanks to Nightfire for sending this one my way!
Grimdark Dad 