#SummerThrills ‘Crypt Of The Moon Spider’ by Nathan Ballingrud

About the book…

A young woman, committed to an asylum, undergoes a bizarre treatment that unlocks a vast well of power in this cosmic horror novella, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher.

Veronica Brinkley has been committed to The Barrowfield Home, run by Dr. Cull, to treat her depression. The institution is built on the crypt of a giant Lunar Spider, tended to by a monastic group of worshippers called the Alabaster Scholars. Dr. Cull is using the lunar silk from the dead spider to “repair” people’s brains.

As Veronica’s memories are tampered with, she finds a surprising reserve of power within herself, upending everyone else’s plans for her and stepping into a grand new role she had never imagined for herself.

Thank you so so much to the team at Titan for my gifted review copy of ‘Crypt Of The Moon Spider’

The first in a new, Lunar Gothic trilogy, this novella is published in e-book and hardcover formats on August 27th 24.

Oh my god.

Apologies in advance as I do not think I am in anyway at all articulate enough to say how this book affected me.

There are some stories that leave you fractured, you are not the same person you were before picking them up-a brief list of mine includes And Then There Were None, Lord Of The Flies, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Moby Dick , The Golden Notebook and Moby Dick.

Crypt of the Moon Spider joins these ranks, I read it at white hot hear over the past two days, an ever increasing scream rattling around and bashing the confines of my skull as I was trying to work out just what was going on.

In this opening salvo of the Lunar Gothic trilogy, which transcends genre, time and space, an inconceivable and yet totally realised conceit, Mrs Veronica Brinkley is sent to the moon by her husband, due to not fulfilling her wifely duties as she should in those golden days of the 1920’s, as her black moods are frankly inconvenient and annoying. Her mother warned her, as a child not to be selfish and center a life around her needs, and obviously these warnings went completely unheeded.

So it’s off to the Barrowfield Home For Melancholy, where the sinister Dr Cull has perfected a technique to remove the black, sad and destrcutive tendencies of thos who are weighing their families down with their expectations of living a meaningful life.

And if something should go wrong, well, at least these are not people cluttering up polite society-out of sight and mind takes on a whole new resonance here.

Off she goes in a rocket to the Moon, a place she had always heard so much of, as a child, the dream destination made real but under the wrong circumstances.

The absolutely stunning journey is where the reader settles in , bracing for impact and the way in which the planet is described, it is all to easy to believe that this is not a planet, but the skull of an elder god inhabited by a long dead Moon Spider, attended by acolytes called Alabaster Scholars who live in labyrinths under the surface.

Once arrived and ‘settled’, sessions with Dr Cull take place that she remembers very little about, and yet she is told she has agreed to ‘treatment’ . His manservant, Charlie, a man for whom murder comes easy, she re-names ‘Grub’ and as the story progresses it becomes so much more apt than could be imagined.

Because, I am not going into details regarding the treatment so as not to spoil it for you, the arrival of Veronica and her subsequent procedures rattles something loose which for far too long has been silent and still.

I am not sure how to say this, but the book is almost subdued in this air of silence, you can feel the atmosphere, sense the quiet and waiting of the planet, and the whole thing pulses into such grotesque life it becomes a fevre dream taken whilst awake. I read this on the train, in a waiting room at the doctors with my daughter,and fell asleep (in retrospect being awake for 24 hrs, after a 12.5 hr night shift and going straight into parental duties was not the ideal circumstances to read this). I fell asleep as I read and woke with a scream, the only other person in the waiting room quickly moved away from me, not that I blame him…so that’s just a tip, dear reader, be fully aware of environment when reading this novella. I read it in the car on the way to take the afore mentioned daughter to university orientation today, and then paced the house like a mad person trying to make sense of what I had just read.

How amazing is that?

To have such a gift of storytelling and description that someone half a world away is left completely spellbound and disoriented? It’s bloody magic!

It feels like you are being wrapped in this silken cocoon of awareness by slowly spinning spiders, there is so much to take on board-the names of the places and people, the back stories, the science of the experiments, all of it develops into this crescendo of horror and fear and also a tiny bit of relief that this all happening so far ‘away’ that it affords the reader a sense of safety.

Some thoughts-

Barrowfield-the name of the sanitorium suggests that nothing will grow there, it’s where things die, or is it?

Dr Cull-killing who and what though? Literally and figuratively murdering his way to a better version of humanity, the line between madness and sanity has never been so fine.

We have a long history, us humans, of sending those distasteful people who do not conform, who do not behave, away. Especially women.

It’s almost as though madness will catch if you are around it too long.

There are elements of the way that madness can be ‘fixed’ which still permeate the consciousness of today, a society which is far more ‘advanced’ and yet still does not talk about mental maladies. In erasing memories, where do they go? And how do we learn to live with this in a world which now talks about ‘speaking our truth’ if we cannot recognise just what truth and reality is?

Wow. It just leave me feeling raw, exposed and absolutely desperate to read volume 2, a taster of which is thoughtfully included in the novella. It’s a short novella but holds such power within it’s pages, it’s sharpness and economy of invention complements each other beautifully. In the meantime, I have ‘Wounds’to read.

So highly recommended, if you took George Melies, HG Wells and Jules Verne shot through with Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, you might come close to what reading Crypt Of The Moon Spider is like, for this reader.

About the author…