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Synopsis:
Crypt of the Moon Spider is a dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs.
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 trouble lurks in many a mind at this facility 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.
Review:
Everything that Nathan Ballingrud has published is worth reading. From his first book of stories, North American Lake Monsters, to his debut novel The Strange, almost everyone who reads his books becomes a fan. He has not released many books, yet North American Lake Monsters was adapted into the Hulu series Monsterland, and his novella The Visible Filth was filmed in 2019 as Wounds. To write a handful of books but already have two big adaptations shows the quality of the stories he writes. His latest novella, Crypt of the Moon Spider, is the first in the Lunar Gothic Trilogy, and this first volume is the beginning of a story that seems like a mixture of horror, sci-fi, and alternate history.
The novella takes place in 1923 on a moon covered in forests, caverns, and rivers. Veronica Brinkley is brought to the moon to be signed over to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, a sanatorium where rich people dump their loved ones for someone else take care of their ails. Veronica quickly meets Dr. Cull and his assistant, whom she names “Grub.” It does not take very long after Veronica meets Dr. Cull that he is experimenting with brain surgeries, cutting out a piece here and there, using moon spider silk as neurotransmitters, and changing his patients into whomever he wants in the name of health and science.
Crypt of the Moon Spider is short and fast paced. There are many elements that are interesting, and I hope that they are explored in further volumes, but this is the problem with this introduction. For as heavy as it is on history, world building, and Dr. Cull experimenting on patients, Ballingrud does not spend much time getting deep enough into characters that we actually feel sympathy or empathy for them. This is not to say that the story is entertaining and fascinating. Ballingrud has proven beyond any doubts that everything that he writes is compelling even if it more plot driven than character driven. I find myself more interested in the world Ballingrud is building than the people who are being affected by it, mostly because I have been given more of chance to understand the moon spider universe than to feel attached to any of the characters.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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