The Endless Horrors of an Unknowable Mind
Reviews
By Colin Sneed
Nathan Ballingrud knows how to build a house. His latest work, Crypt of the Moon Spider, is the introductory novella of his Lunar Gothic trilogy and, boy, does it lay a horrific foundation. This is a genre-hopping exploration of loneliness and despair, about how terrible, unspeakable things live, grow, and reach out in the darkness. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.
It’s 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is headed to the moon. Specifically, to a dark and unsettling bit of gothic architecture deep in the moon woods known as the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, where Veronica—at the behest of her dismissive dickhead husband—hopes to be cured of her deep, debilitating depression by the renowned Dr. Cull. How does he do it? Well, it involves a deceased giant godlike spider, its mysterious silk, and the scary things that live underground. Add in a heaping dose of horror both medical and body and there you have it. Dear reader, I don’t know what scares you, but I’d put money down that it’s described here in gruesome detail.
Veronica is checked into the facility and is soon introduced to the good doctor—a large and imposing beast of a man prone to violence and a robed worshipper of the aforementioned house-sized moon spider—as well as his cultish staff of a few eager, white-garbed assistants, all of whom surely have nothing to hide. She also meets a fellow patient who describes the terrible thing he did to warrant his stay here at the Barrowfield Home and patiently awaits the experimental operation that will cure him. Nothing like a little avant-garde neurosurgery to really turn things around.
Playing on common fears of isolation, abandonment, and betrayal, and then ratcheting it up with the endless horrors of an unknowable mind, the author taps into something much deeper than the book’s B-movie title would suggest. What do you do when you become a stranger to yourself, when your memories feel like someone else’s? And what if the thing you fear most is waiting just for you, and you can’t help but be led kicking and screaming toward its gaping maw?
This is my first Nathan Ballingrud, and it took me a moment to acclimate to his spare and efficient style. But nearing the end of this book’s scant 112 pages, I wanted to stay wrapped up in this warm, disgusting moon-world cocoon. Which brings me to the only real problem I have with Crypt of the Moon Spider—it doesn’t feel like a complete story. Obviously there are two more entries coming in this trilogy, so I shouldn’t complain too much, but the plot really gets moving in its second half and it’s hard not to feel a little deflated when you turn that last page.
What I’m left with is a loose and sporadic sense of the world where this story is told, which is unfortunate because so much of what makes this type of horror work is attention to the details within the larger picture, along with enough time to soak it all in. Ballingrud wants you to view the vast, quiet, immutable stillness of the lunar landscape the same way Veronica does, as more mythological than real. She recalls a local legend “which held that the moon was the inhabited skull of a long-dead god who once trod the dark pathways of space like a king through his star-curtained palace.” When she arrives, it’s cold and lonely and there’s no one there to talk to, let alone give her a tour of the place. It’s understandable why the choice was made to obscure the set, but if you tell me the moon has lush, green forests covered in silk from an ancient mega-spider, I can only want to know more.
The sprint to set the stage for future novels kept me from having to stay too long within the stylized confines of the story, and the claustrophobic, choking feelings of being trapped and of being alone never are allowed to sink in their teeth and take full advantage of the creepy atmosphere Ballingrud creates. Even so, part 1 got me hooked, despite its pacing issues, and the day part 2 releases I’ll pick it up and devour it, like so many goo-dripping spider mouths.
When not reading and watching horror, Colin Sneed plays in multiple punk bands, runs a small indie record label, and spends time with his family in Durham, North Carolina.
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