REVIEW: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud
For those who can remember introductory English classes, Crypt of the Moon Spider is like if Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper took place on the moon—with psychic spiders, spider-silk lobotomies and a repressed woman’s eight-legged revenge. In this first novella of what will be The Lunar Gothic Trilogy, Nathan Ballingrud has gifted us with a story that goes from eerie to downright nightmarish, with a feverish ending that I happily savored long after turning the last page (arachnophobes, stay away).
It’s 1923, and Crypt of the Moon Spider opens with Veronica being dropped off (read: abandoned) by her husband at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, a mental institution on the forested dark side of the moon. It’s run by Dr. Barrington Cull—who can quickly be pegged as the mad scientist sort—and his brutish assistant who Veronica calls Grub. The doctor is renowned for lobotomizing patients and using the silk of the long dead moon spiders to repair their brains. He is aided in surgeries by the white-clad acolytes of the moon spiders, the Alabaster Scholars. Once the surgeries start, Veronica begins to lose grip on reality. She drifts into unsettling flashbacks to her childhood that suggest either Cull or the Scholars are implanting memories, or she’s repressed her dark past. Grub, whose masterfully written and chilling dialog I loved, is revealed to have a surprising role here, too.
After this slow burn beginning, the plot frantically gallops towards a mind-bending finale. Cleaved skulls, giant spider legs erupting out of brains, and Bene Gesserit style schemes wrap up what is now one of my favorite novellas.
Setting the book in 1923 allows Barrowfield to mirror the horrific and inhumane treatment of people—and especially women—who suffered from mental health in this era (and still today, though less extreme). At times, I was enraged. At others, heartbroken. As someone who knows the feeling of being institutionalized, I think several passages poignantly communicated that experience. The scene where the door closes to her cell, and she’s sitting alone on her bed, in silence, was deeply moving. There’s a palpable claustrophobia to the whole book, as well. Veronica is confined in her mind, and her life has been confined to the whims of men. This makes her later empowerment, though gruesome, rather satisfying.
While I was fully onboard with an interesting sci-fi/horror plot, Ballingrud’s elegant, evocative and at times truly arresting writing style was my favorite aspect. Veronica is often lost in detached fantasies to escape her depression, and the book perfectly captures that state with haunting analogies and descriptions of the world around her. The effect of his prose was striking enough that I wanted to reread so many sentences, but the writing was so smooth that I found myself gliding through page after page.
Crypt of the Moon Spider ends up being more of an emotional and sensory experience rather than a cerebral one. The book brings up important ideas of women’s agency and mental health, which definitely helps electrify the end of Veronica’s character arc. However, they seem more like tools to achieve certain emotional payoff moments rather than points of conversation. Not necessarily a shortcoming, but a trade off, especially to maintain the wonderful pacing of this short work.
I ended up reading Crypt of the Moon Spider twice, and loved lingering in its beautiful, haunting dreamscape just as much both times. Whether you come for the spiders or the prose, I think you’ll leave happily unsettled by both.
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