Review of The Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud was, hands down, my biggest discovery as a reader in 2023. Seeing the release of his novella The Crypt of the Moon Spider in 2024, I was on it like white on rice. Turns out writing to a deadline (?) means something...

The Crypt of the Moon Spider follows the classic horror storyline of: woman is committed to a sanitarium as madness slowly creeps in. Her story is ostensibly set on the moon, and its secrets, particularly those of an underground cult, are slowly revealed as she undergoes therapy. A mad doctor, his Igor-esque assistant, and the cult culminate in a splashy ending.

Compared to the uniqueness of North American Lake Monsters and to the care and focus Ballingrud put into his only novel The Strange, The Crypt of the Moon Spider feels like fireworks with no boom. More than just edges filed down for mass market consumption, Ballingrud's prose is only semi-organized. Several times I caught myself reorganizing paragraphs and sentences for better effect. And the story's structure likewise needed editing to achieve its effect. A couple of examples: at about the three-quarters mark, just as the grand climax/reveal is about to kick off, the narrative diverges into the backstory of a secondary character. Not good timing; that should have appeared closer to the beginning. Another structural issue is that the woman's husband receives minimal backstory, and yet a revenge scene involving him appears. For that scene to have had the desired impact, the reader needed to care about the husband. But they don't have enough back story to care, which leads to a gratuitous scene rather than the meaningful one it was intended to be.

And the issues continue. In ~60 pages, Ballingrud presents the following: alternate history, gothic horror, steampunk, body horror, dream sequences, science fiction, psychological horror—topped off by a small spot of splatterpunk. It whirls through a true milieu. I'm not a person who thinks stories need to stick to one or two modes to be a success, only that in this case it's a kitchen sink of genre for only 60 pages, and as such never lets the true horror of the story penetrate to its desired depths. Anything can happen, and therefore the reader is not bothered when anything does.

In the end, The Crypt of the Moon Spider feels like a story that was birthed kicking and screaming into the world, i.e. written to meet a deadline without an organic idea in mind that had a chance to grow roots. It has all the required body parts and cries when you smack the bottom of its feet, but the body parts are out of proportion and there is a case of jaundice when it comes to the prose. Covered in placental goo, I imagine Ballingrud would like to have it back for a few months to clean it, polish it, and put dry clothes on it.