BOOK REVIEW | CRYPT OF THE MOON SPIDER | NATHAN BALLINGRUD
BOOK OVERVIEW
Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.
It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.
But trouble lurks in many a mind at this facility and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.
REVIEW
Welcome dear reader to this what I think may end up as a rambling review of Crypt Of The Moon Spider (please excuse the difficulty of determining where capital letters should be placed when a book has a long title. I mean, do you put the capitals on the small words like ‘of’ and ‘the’, I don’t know, but I did just in case they got a complex and thought that they might be less important than the big words like ‘Moon’ and ‘Spider’ and ‘Crypt’, which you have got to admit do deserve their capital letters, but I don’t want the little letters to feel left out and feel they don’t have the gravitas as those other words).
Anyway, let’s get back on track shall we instead of worrying about the fragile egos of little words.
Now first and foremost, I am going to make an apology! You might ask what the hell for, he hasn’t said anything yet, well except for wondering about whether little words may feel a little hard done by, but it’s not for that! I mean I thought it, so I think that I may not be alone in the world and there may be someone out there that wondered the same thing and had that sly thought insert itself into their heads. No? Just me then! Ah well, at least now you might think it in the future (is that the voice of the Angel Morrissey harking from the heralds bellowing ‘stop me, oh oh oh stop me, stop me if you think you have heard this one before?’)
Right, let’s get back to the apology. What I meant to say is that I apologise for how much I use the word ‘creepy’ throughout this review. I know it is going to pop up several times coz this book has a whole load of creepy in it. There’s creepy people, a creepy gothic Victorian insane asylum and whole raft of creepy crawly spiders, so the word might insert itself into various parts of the review, and if it does pop in to make an appearance more than once, I do apologise (I mean we are already on a count of four now and I haven’t even said anything about the book, and the word creepy has insinuated itself four times - whoops make that five!)
I suppose I ought to tell you what the book is about (if you have stuck with me this long, I may as well hadn’t I?). Crypt of the Moon Spider takes place in 1923, except it’s not like the 1923 that we know from the history books, all flappy skirts, prohibition and the Charleston. No! This is an entirely different 1923 where there are Buck Rodgers or Edgar Rice Burroughs type rocket ships that make regular journeys to the moon to drop off rich mentally ill patients who want to get in on the act of eminent psychiatrist Dr Barrington Cull (or Barry, if you want to piss him off! Which does crop up in the book at a later point!), who has set up his institute, The Barrowfield Home for the Treatment of the Treatment of The Melancholy. (I suppose Mr Ballingrud only had a fleeting thought for the lesser egos of those poor smaller words).
Here, Dr Cull has had surprisingly good results in the treatment of those people who experience the feelings of sadness (squared) by using the abundant resource of Moon Spider silk. In addition to this, it also gives the families of the afflicted the opportunity to drop them off their unwell relatives pronto, and then retire them to the back of their brains at a place called distant memory.
Enter our new patient, Veronica and her husband (who under the guise of caring, gentle husband, is keen to slip the yoke of his encumberment, i.e. his wife, and jetpack his way back down to earth and start his life afresh), hoping to get the radical new treatment and rid herself of the black periods that have marred her existence and lead her into thoughts of ending her life.
Upon landing on the moon, they are met by Head Custodian Charlie who is charged with taking her to her rooms (he is definitely not a nurse! Well, he might be, but more in the Nurse Ratchett type of nurse, and definitely not the Florence Nightingale or Mary Seacole type that would suggest a caring kind of nurse). After the initial introductions, Charlie soon turns quite creepy (Bang! And there we have it folks, the first encore of the word that made its first appearance all the way back in paragraph - you count em!), as does this so called caring environment.
After several insistences (which are summarily ignored and lead Veronica to mount protests and eventually lead to despondency), she meets the renowned owner of the home, Dr Barrington Cull, who explains the process of how he is going to fix her, all under the watchful gaze of Soma, an Alabaster Scholar, who belongs to a group of secularists who worship the Moon Spider.
After a Freudian, psychoanalytic trip to her childhood as a poor farmers girl under the vast skies of Nebraska, Veronica is taken back to her room to await her first treatment where she will discover the true horrors of the treatments that Dr Cull employs to cure the mentally bereft and unwell.
Mixing science fiction, horror and a heavy dash of dreamlike surrealism, Ballingrud writes an immersive tale that much like the spider silk Dr Cull purports will cure any mental illness, weaves its way into your brain.
You soon get used to the style of prose that he uses as he shows us the horrors that the patients of the home will experience as Ballingrud illustrates the frankenstinian experiments that were a part of early mental health care.
Throughout the story there is a genre soup of horror styles, such as body horror and cosmic horror, as well as a touch of the gothic.
Perfect for fans of people like Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron and other such luminaries of weird fiction, Crypt Of The Moon Spider creeps into your unconsciousness to lay its eggs of unease as you traverse it’s pages.
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