By CHRIS HALLOCK
Crypt of the Moon Spider
Nathan Ballingrud
Tor Nightfire
If writers fashioned buildings from words, Nathan Ballingrud would erect cathedrals. His vivid stories are forged in anguish, layered with deeply unsettling imagery and ideas. His work features fragile characters exposed to unspeakable horrors manifesting from the netherworld. CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER, the novella that begins his upcoming Lunar Gothic trilogy, finds Ballingrud capitalizing on these strengths while expanding his creative boundaries. It’s a remarkable feat, considering the imaginative depths evident in his unnerving collections Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell (also published as The Atlas of Hell: Stories) and North American Lake Monsters: Stories as well as his recent Bradbury-esque space Western novel, The Strange. This opening installment sets its course for insidious new territories in Ballingrud’s twisted, dark universe.
It’s 1923. Abandoned by her controlling husband, a despondent Veronica Brinkley is admitted into the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, a mental health facility located on the moon. The hospital is situated on forested grounds coated in silken webs and presided over by Dr. Barrington Cull, a renowned scientist whose methods seemingly scoop bad thoughts directly out of the afflicted’s minds. Veronica surrenders her autonomy to Cull, and his masochistic henchman, Grub, while enduring the doctor’s increasingly invasive procedures. The lore surrounding the facility tells of enormous, long-extinct Lunar Spiders that once roamed the moon, and the Alabaster Scholars, a monastic sect who worship them, rumored to be lurking in Barrowfield’s vast subterranean corridors. Could Veronica’s link to these ancient creatures hold the key to her liberation from her hellish confinement?
Nathan Ballingrud, author of “CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER”
Ballingrud reconfigures Gothic literature by imbuing his tale with elements of bizarro sci-fi, warped history, profound grotesquerie and monstrous divinity. Perhaps inadvertently, the story shares spiritual kinship with Polish sci-fi writer Jerzy Żuławski’s Lunar Trilogy, which features Earthling colonizers on the moon and the chaos that ensues from human settlement. One could imagine Barrowfield connected to the havoc caused by science and religion present in Żuławski’s saga. The book also calls to mind asylum-set classics rooted in realism like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, intimate novels that take us into the minds of conflicted protagonists entrusted to the care of an inhuman system. In Ballingrud’s hands, however, these works are redrawn with the provocative sensibilities of Clive Barker, where extraordinary suffering bleeds into spiritual ecstasy on paths laid out on human wreckage. Ballingrud’s ability to detail the ghastly and the uncanny is positively exquisite – from the split skulls and severed limbs splattering the institution walls to the spindly devout beings and fearsome old gods that invoke deep dread.
An asylum on the moon sets a stunning stage for Veronica’s brutal quest for identity. It’s also a wonderful setting in which to engage the reader with the story’s plentiful heady themes, including societal attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, scientific and religious dogma, suicide and self-harm and the callous treatment of those struggling with mental illness. Ballingrud uses allegory to prompt uncomfortable conversations about ethics and human decency by visiting issues prevalent in the Victorian era, echoing into our increasingly dehumanizing contemporary times. Ballingrud seems to relish in dangling his readers over a nihilistic abyss but is mindful that the human heart, no matter how faint its beat, is the tether that keeps us engaged. The author accomplishes this by giving us glimpses of Veronica’s past, using poetic interludes situated in a liminal space between dream, memory and nightmare. While Veronica’s recollections are presented as unreliable, these emotional passages balance the escalating horror with her underlying humanity. Although the bleak brutality coloring his body of work is a constant, these moments reveal that Ballingrud hasn’t surrendered completely to despair.
Ballingrud’s diabolical mind – our world’s own Atlas of Hell – discharges relentlessly distressing horrors concealed in the ordinary. With CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER, he has expanded the border of hell into the reaches of the cosmos, where no celestial space is immune to human corruption and destructive behavior. The limitless possibilities offered by this trilogy signal Ballingrud’s moment to transcend his already formidable talent beyond our wildest fevered dreams.
