Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the ARC.

Really creepy, alternate history and eldritch horror. Spiders on the moon and in your brain, the "revolutionary procedure" involves letting the spiders spin webs to repair the mind. The descriptions are very evocative concerning the surgery part. Nothing is left to the imagination in that regard. Kind of a Ship of Theseus thing going on here, when parts of your mind/personailty is replaced by spiders, how long can you claim to still be yourself. I'm intrigued by the setting, and I'm glad this is a part of a trilogy because there is so much left unanswered concerning the wider world in this series.

"She looked like a monster herself. Like some horrible lab experiment crawled from its jar, lurching hungrily through the dark.

The thought filled her with an emotion so alien to her experience, it took her some time to recognize it as joy."

3.8/5 stars

I read this last November, when the entire autumn had a kind of distinct Halloween-y vibe that had me wanting to interact with horror content throughout the season. This satiated my spooky desires perfectly. As many others have said, this novella was truly unsettling in a way that can be difficult to find these days - especially with its short length.

It's the 1920s, and Veronica is struggling mentally. She has a darkness inside her that, unfortunately, has caused her husband to send her to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, an asylum on the moon. Instead of the typical treatments, however, this sanatorium uses a revolutionary method. Using the silk of the moon spider, a lunar creature with a host of devout worshippers, Dr. Cull promises that he can essentially rework his patients' brains. Of course, everything is not as it seems, and between the cult's feverish acolytes, mad scientist-esque doctors, and the body horror of having *spiders crawling all over your actual brain,* the situation quickly spirals into something even more disturbing than expected.

I really loved this. Veronica is a very real and tragic character, and to see her go from a woman who is essentially being sent away to be "dealt with" because her melancholy is too much to handle, to a woman who outsmarts all her captors and ascends to something much bigger... The entire novella felt like an insane dream that keeps twisting and turning in the best way.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Nathan Ballingrud's CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER is the first entry in his Lunar Gothic trilogy, which takes readers on a journey to an alternate reality where the moon was one a thriving ecosystem where an enormous spider once lived. Its worshippers discovered its silk had magical properties that granted them power. Now, the moon is simply a home to the renowned Barrowfield Home for the Treatment of Melancholy where Dr. Barrington Cull performs treatments that are invasive and morally questionable, but deliver results. Veronica Brinkley arrives at the facility and becomes embroiled in a plot tied to the moons past that may tie into her own history. CRYPT OF THE MOON STORY sees one of the genre's most imaginative minds blend the feel of pulps of yesteryear with a modern, inventive twist that makes this novella feel timeless and utterly engaging. I can't wait to follow the rest of the series!

I’ve been thinking about the horror genre a lot lately and, specifically, what makes it work. I’m not the first person to ponder this question, and I’m probably one of the least qualified to do so. Horror is a genre I’ve mostly shied away from over the years, but in the last few years, I’ve been reading it more frequently. Part of this, for me, is the general state of the world, but I also think it’s because horror often features ‘deep lore’ that isn’t fully explained. I loved Scott Leeds’ Schrader’s Chord, and a huge part of that was the weird monsters we only get a little explanation of. If it had been a horror movie, that would’ve likely been mined to oblivion in sequels and spin-offs. But in prose horror, we’re often left to wrestle with the questions ourselves. Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate were two other books that did this brilliantly, in my opinion.
Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider is another book that captures that feeling of ‘deep lore.’ It’s set in the 1920s, and in this world, there are forests on the moon, lunar shuttles, and giant spiders. Very quickly, you get the palpable sense that this is not our world, and there’s also a distinct feeling of “there are more stories in this world.” Ballingrud gives us just a taste of these through the story of a woman who’s sent to a mental hospital on the moon for a mysterious and novel treatment for ‘melancholia.’ Explaining too much about the treatment would be a spoiler, but suffice it to say, it’s very spidery and creepy. Between the lore behind the spiders on the moon, their mysterious servants called the Alabaster Scholars, and what’s happening to the patients at the hospital, so much goes unexplained. I was left with so many questions, and I’m eager to see if they’re answered in the future volumes of this trilogy.
However, if not for these elements, I might not have kept reading the book. First, this is a brutal little book filled with body horror and grim scenes. While I’ve grown to appreciate the horror genre, this particular subgenre—body horror—is not something I have much taste for. There were moments I had to skim chapters because the body horror became too much for me. Second, there are very few endearing characters outside of our heroine. Pretty much everyone else in this book is horrible and predatory, and our main character is essentially a pawn in their schemes. If, like me, you’re not a huge fan of these aspects of the horror genre, I’d recommend reading this one with caution. Also, if you’re afraid of spiders, this book is not for you. It’s packed with spiders in all the places you don’t want them.
Overall, this book was a fascinating read, and I’m looking forward to Ballingrud’s follow-up, The Cathedral of the Drowned. I’ll approach it with some caution, anticipating the body horror that’s likely to appear, but I’m confident I’ll find the world he’s crafting just as fascinating. This is one of the best alternate history timelines I’ve come across in a long time.

What a messed up story! I liked it, but be prepared for some serious weirdness.

When Veronica’s husband drops her off at The Barrowfield Home for the Treatment of the Melancholy, a mental hospital set on the moon, she believes it’s the place where she’ll finally be cured from the darkness that’s followed her all of her life.

But what she soon realizes is that something dark is taking place. Something evil. As her treatments grow increasingly strange, as she learns about the immense spider that used to live deep within the surface of the moon and it’s silky web, highly valued on Earth for it’s unusual properties, Veronica’s role in the facility takes am unexpected turn.

Crypt of the Moon Spider was much darker than I had anticipated. There were some truly horrifying scenes! It also has at times a dreamy, abstract quality to the writing, paralleling Veronica’s mental state and adding to our feeling of unease and distrust.

My main critique is it’s lack of strong character development. It’s short length hiders our ability as readers to connect with the characters. So while the atmosphere and creepiness deserves a 10/10, it was hard to feel that scared or invested when I never connected with the characters. This is part of a series, and I will definitely read on, so maybe the characterization will improve in later books. But the characters were the weakest part of The Strange by the same author, so…we’ll see.

Still, I think this is well worth reading if you enjoy sci-fi mixed with horror, if you like a creepy mental hospital setting, and if you find spiders scary.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the digital arc. All opinions are my own.

Veronica was the star for me. While reading I did feel like I was being watched by spiders but hey it comes with the territory. This novel is a haunting good time

I finished this book a little more that 12 hours ago and honestly still have no idea how to put in words how it made me feel or how I felt about it. It reminded me of an episode of the Twilight Zone but much more sinister and gory. The story for the most part is easy to process and navigate. Then I feel like about halfway through the book is where the story morphs into a fever dream. Still easy to navigate and understand what is happening but it just keeps getting more and more bizarre. I'm still not completely sure that I understand the entirety of the story but I look forward to reading this again in the future to see if there is something that I will pick up on that will slide all the pieces into place. Over all though this is a book that will seriously live rent free in the silver webs in my head.

This book was deliciously horrifying and disturbing. It never lets up for a sentence, immersing you in the webs of the moon spiders with no breathe of ease.
Will absolutely be checking out the sequels, and this authors other work!

Exactly the kind of modern Weird Tales story you’d expect from a title like Crypt of the Moon Spider. Highly recommend!

This was not at all what I thought it was going to be, but I liked it. I'm pretty curious to see where it goes from here, because it's an interesting world. If you became interested by the name and cover art making it look like some sort of grimdark sci-fi/fantasy novel, just know that it's almost more like a Shutter Island type story with some mafia stuff thrown in, that just also happens to be sci-fi. It's just like wildly short, even for a novella, so I'm hoping the next books come out soon because I'd like to know what happens. Thanks for the ARC!

When we first meet Veronica Brinkley as she’s on her way to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, we already know that this is not going to be a pretty story because the sense of creeping dread is there from the very first page.

At first, in spite of the story’s setting, that creeping dread is of the mundane but still extremely chilling variety. It’s clear that it’s set at in a period where it was entirely too easy for a woman to be labeled “mad” or “melancholy” or “hysterical” by doctors in cooperation with their husbands and fathers as a way of getting rid of an inconvenient child or spouse by locking them up in an asylum and waiting to receive word of their inevitable demise.

Veronica is well aware that her husband doesn’t expect her “black spells” to ever be cured. She’s never expected to return to their Boston home. The most terrible part of the opening of the story is that she feels she’s earned her place at Barrowfield – that it’s what she deserves for being weak, useless and self-absorbed. For failing in her duties as a wife.

And her treatment is horrific enough – and would be even if it was confined to the historically available treatments of its 1920s setting. But this is a version of our world – and our solar system – that owes a lot to the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Barrowfield is on the moon, a moon that once housed an indigenous species of giant spiders that would have the power to make even the mighty Shelob quake in her lair.

But those giant spiders left behind vast webs in the lunar forests, and a surprising number of more-or-less human priests and worshippers who seem to be passing the gifts of the moon spiders on to the staff at Barrowfield, where the patients are treated by scooping out parts of their brains and replacing their supposedly diseased brain matter with moon spider silk.

It sounds barbaric – only because it is. It’s clear that Barrowfield’s medical chief has an agenda for his experimentation that he never reveals to the wealthy clients who commit their wives and daughters to his care. He knows they don’t, wouldn’t and won’t care about any supposed ‘treatment’ he might possibly think to administer.

But the acolytes of the moon spiders have an agenda of their own. And in Veronica Brinkley, they’ve found the perfect receptacle for their hopes, dreams and plans. All they have to do is wait, and watch, and let the doctor do his work – up to the point where they can finally do their own.

Escape Rating B: I was absolutely fascinated and utterly creeped out by this story, all at the same time. If it had stayed with historical treatments it would have been creepy enough, because damn but they were.

Howsomever, the elements of Verne and Wells and the moon spiders absolutely kicked the whole thing onto another level entirely. Not in the way that the acolytes took control of Barrowfield, because that was both expected and honestly hoped for in a peculiar way.

But the implications that the reader is left with at the end definitely embody next-level chill.

Which is where the issue I had with this book absolutely kicked in with a vengeance. Not that the vengeance aspects of the story bothered me at all because all the men involved with this story were a despicable and deserving bunch of fellows.

The SFnal aspects of the story were enough to carry me over – or perhaps through – the horror aspects of the thing, except for the image of Veronica left in my mind at the end. For anyone who has ever played Dragon Age: Awakening, the expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, well, in my head Veronica ends up as a saner, more self-aware version of The Mother from that game, and the idea of a saner version is seriously both frightening and stomach-churning.

Circling back around, the thing that is keeping this from an A-, because I was certainly riveted, chilled and downright appalled at points more than enough for that, is that the story feels incomplete – and not just in the sense that it’s labeled as book 1 in a trilogy.

I’m left on the horns of a reading dilemma that it feels like I didn’t get enough of this story – even though it contains plenty of things that I wouldn’t want in any more detail. It’s more that I turned the final page feeling like I didn’t know nearly enough of how this world got to this point and that I was piecing together bits in my mind much the same way that Veronica’s mind got pieced together and I feel the missing bits every bit as much.

Which means I’ll be waiting with the proverbial bated breath for book 2, Cathedral of the Drowned, in the creeped out hope that I’ll get more of that connective spider silk in the next part of the story this time next year!

This novella is the first of a trilogy and I have Thoughts about that. As a reader, I love that there's more of this story to be had, even as it's satisfyingly complete as is. As a reviewer, I love that we're bringing the novella back: I'm tired of slogging through 300+ page books that seem written to hit an imaginary value-for-money size instead of focusing on an actually interesting story devoid of bloat. But as someone who definitely used to worry about value for money when it came to buying books, part of me frets at not getting enough quantity with my quality. Would it have been better to get all three parts of the Lunar Gothic trilogy in one volume that combines economy with immediacy?

These are all issues that remind me of why I've never been interested in going into publishing. I don't care about other people's money. I have little enough of my own as it is to want to worry about others'. So, devoid of any concerns regarding format and marketing, I can safely say that this is an excellent story and that I'm glad that there'll be more of it to be had in the very near future.

The story itself takes place in an alternate past, where the moon is not an arid rock but a satellite with a breathable atmosphere, complete with forests that speckle its surface. Some of these forests are still blanketed in the gossamer webs of the giant spider that once lived in the moon. The moon webs, are they're called, have all sort of interesting properties, some of which have led to their use in the treatment of mental illness.

It's because of this that Veronica Brinkley has been brought to the moon by her concerned husband. It's 1923, and the Barrowfield Home For Treatment Of The Melancholy has gained a sterling reputation for restoring health and happiness to its (wealthy) patients. Dr Barrington Cull is at the cutting edge of neurosurgery, carving away all bad thoughts and memories from sufferers' brains and replacing the excised matter with moon webs, which have the remarkable property of being able to both replace neural connections and foster the growth of more, in presumably healthier directions.

Veronica was once a simple Nebraskan farm girl before moving to Boston, where she eventually met and married her moneyed and never-named surgeon husband. Now he's decided that her depressive bouts are impinging too much on their day-to-day lives, and has brought her here for treatment. The place is spare but better than her melancholia expected. As she undergoes Dr Cull's treatments, however, she begins to doubt the thoughts that have sprung up in her head. Her most cherished and seemingly innocuous memories have turned into fever dreams of murder. Veronica swears that she never carried an axe into her farmhouse one evening as a teenager intent on carnage, but what other explanation could there possibly be?

The rest of the book is a wild, Gothic nightmare of incarceration and slaughter, as Veronica grasps at a bold new future hopefully devoid of men telling her how to think and behave. I loved so much how this was set loosely in the 1920s, when vivisection and quackery ran rampant as people in relative positions of power tried to "fix" their loved ones with cruel and invasive surgeries instead of being accepting and accommodating of differences, and perhaps reassessing their own approaches to family. So much is packed into this short book of horror that I'm definitely impatient to see the themes and overarching plot threads explored in further volumes.

And, as a writer, I am firmly behind whatever gets Nathan Ballingrud more money. Novellas, collected volumes, whatever: he deserves to be rewarded for stories as entertaining and briskly-paced as this one is. I can't wait to read more.

Crypt Of The Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud was published August 27 2024 by Tor Nightfire and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9781250291738">Bookshop!</a>

I have no idea what I just read. A fantastical exposure of mental health treatment, lack of value and concern for our brethren. Plus an extinct spider who whispered the secrets of the universe.
A husband signs away his wife - custody given to Dr Cull and his innovative, unorthodox treatment of mental health. In 1923. On the Moon.
Veronica is assessed, treatment planned and waiting. Social time means outside in the garden - a man who attempted to kill himself and his family acts as the only sane patient. Telling truths.

CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER (its sequel arrives in 2025) is an odd and unusual novel I'd classify as New Weird, even Bizarro. It's also wildly-alternative History! Set in 1924, Shuttles to the Moon have been a regular daily event for decades. The Dark Side of the Moon is densely forested, and those forests are suffused with Spider webbing.

In the forest exists a sort of Horrifying insane asylum, one that strongly evokes the misogynistic psychological culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, only in this case patients are both female and male. The director/surgeon is an absolute lunatic; indeed, lunatics abound throughout, and I'm not referring to the poor involuntarily committed patients.

THE CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER is involving, riveting, thought-provoking, and I can't wait to read its sequel!

The nitty-gritty: A surreal take on the asylum trope, Crypt of the Moon Spider is an unsettling, shudder-worthy start to a new series.

This must be my “week of weird,” because I have a review for yet another very weird book. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. Crypt of the Moon Spider is a short novella dripping with gothic atmosphere and dread, and it’s the start of a series. How’s this for a concept: a man forcibly admits his wife to an insane asylum to cure her bouts of “melancholy,” which doesn’t sound that odd, but here’s the twist: the asylum is on the moon. And the story is set in an alternate 1923, where (obviously) moon travel is a common thing. Add in some disturbing body horror and spiders (!) and you have an unusual story unlike anything I’ve read before.

Veronica Brinkley arrives at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of Melancholy, hoping to be cured of her “black spells.” Her husband insists it’s the best thing for her, but when she meets an orderly named Charlie Duchamp, she’s not sure it is. Forced to stay in a small, cell-like room, Veronica is finally taken to Dr. Cull, the Home’s doctor, who explains that in order to cure her, he will have to remove the bad parts of her brain and replace them with something else. Veronica is horrified to discover he’s using spider silk from a creature called the Moon Spider to rewire his patients’ brains, and when she goes though her own surgical procedure, things get really weird. Who are the Alabaster Scholars, and what do they have to do with Dr. Cull’s experiments? Veronica is about to find out.

This is one of those stories where you don’t want to ask too many questions, or you might drive yourself crazy (and trust me, you do not want to end up at Barrowfield Home!) A lot of strange things happen in Crypt of the Moon Spider, and the sequence of events didn’t always make sense. The story has an interesting retro vibe with shades of Frankenstein and other classic horror stories, but the presence of a horrifying spider god on the moon puts this into sci-fi territory. I loved Ballingrud’s twist on the classic 1920s asylum trope, where (mostly) women are considered to be crazy so their husbands have a convenient place to legally lock them away. This time, Veronica starts as the victim but the tables turn when we learn what Dr. Cull’s procedure has done to her, and I thought it was brilliant.

The other character that Ballingrud’s story focuses on is Charlie Duchamp, or “Grub” as Veronica calls him. Through flashbacks, we learn about how he came to work for Dr. Cull and his job at the asylum, which involves keeping an eye on the Alabaster Scholars, who are trying to bring back the long dead Moon Spider they worship. Dr. Cull is equally frightening, as he goes about “treating” the patients at Barrowfield Home, using spider silk from the tunnels below in his diabolical experiments.

Squeamish readers should know going in that there are graphic scenes of brain surgery—and not the normal kind—that involve the previously mentioned spider silk, steel rods and more. And you know what comes with spider silk? Yep, spiders. (shudders)

The violent ending is rather abrupt, and unfortunately we have to wait another year for the sequel, but I’m here for it! Despite my confusion at times, Crypt of the Moon Spider dug its spidery legs into me, and I’m so curious to see what comes next.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

There’s something resonant underneath the gothic surface of Nathan Ballingrud’s CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER. Something human beneath the gossamer strands crisscrossing the moonscape. All you have to do to find it is look - gaze into that vast cradle of cobwebs & tell me what you see.

The writing is striking, as picturesque as it is macabre. This isn’t uncommon for Ballingrud, but his prose here is perhaps the best it’s ever been - from descriptions of the titular crypt, nestled on a moon that’s as dense with forests as it is with death, to a sprawling Nebraska farm unfolding before the stars; every page is vividly dark & plainly beautiful. It’s mesmirizing, & that alone is worth the read.

Fortunately, this novella is much more than a collection of pretty images. Thematically, it centers around perception, identity, individuality, autonomy, & mental illness. That last is probably the most prominent, & what I personally found the most compelling. There seems to be a deliberate connection drawn between the cosmos & the human condition; from the opening paragraph, Ballingrud’s narration compares the Moon to “the inhabited skull of a long, dead god”. It’s not only a fantastic bit of imagery but is also the initial spark of thematic flame that lights the way.

Despite the grotesqueness that often inhabits the narrative - this is, after all, a horror story, & Ballingrud never shies away from this fact - its outlook on mental health is quite encouraging. It manages this without being too overt, & ultimately leaves the reader free to make their own discoveries. It’s thematically open without being vague - intentional but loose on its tracks, ready to run in any direction. It’s a tricky feat, but executed flawlessly here.

If the Moon is a skull, mental illness is a shadow eclipsing the surface. A cold, dark celestial place. Isolating, lonely. But Ballingrud’s artistic liberties are not without purpose - the Moon is covered in lush forests, not only for aesthetics, but because even out here, on this frigid rock careening through space, where nothing should thrive, where everything that tries dies, there can be life. There can be living.

Something about reading, Nathan Ballin grudges work that is deeply unsettling and uncomfortable. His worlds are like a fever dream that feels hard to get your footing and I felt the same way about crypt of the moon spider at the same time. I can’t seem to stop reading his books, as he writes horror like no one else that I’ve read.

This may be my fastest read of the year, partially because of the page count, but also because of how fast paced the story is. The premise is wild and interesting - 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is being brought to the moon by her husband for psychiatric care where a moon spider used to live and the silk from the spider is now being used to treat the patients. There are also these other humanoids that I am not sure what exactly their deal is but one of them works for the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, but the others seem to be spider protectors.

The story is full of psychological horror, especially surrounding losing autonomy and identity. This combined with the premise of the story really made this such an enjoyable read. There is a lot of mystery to what all is happening and how the spider’s silk can do some of the things it does that I wish was explored more, but this is part 1 in a trilogy of novellas so I imagine this will be explored a lot more in the other novellas.

Thank you to @tornightfire and @netgalley for the eARC. All thoughts are my own.

Nicely creepy. I don't <i>think</i> this book is set explicitly in the same universe as Ballingrud's excellent <i>The Strange</i>, but it certainly treads a lot of the same ground in terms of setting - an alternate early 20th-century where space travel is commonplace and easy, but space is not scientifically accurate as we now know it; rather, it's like authors of a century or two ago might have imagined it -- in the case of <i>The Strange</i> Mars is essentially a wild west frontier, and in the case of this book there are weird caves and forests on the moon inhabited by unearthly spider-like creatures. The setting then becomes a backdrop to a whole gothic spooky-asylum type of story. The story itself is pretty slight -- a downside of the novella length -- but the copy I read included a teaser for a sequel, so I'm looking forward to where else Ballingrud takes this.

In 1923, Veronica is sent by her husband to The Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy on the moon. The facility is surrounded by forests covered in spider silk. That description sets up the unique setting for this fantastic first novella in a trilogy. Match that with incredible gothic atmosphere and body horror gives you one creepy strange ride.

I recommend this one for fans of strange stories and science fiction horror. It is a great one.