Crypt of the moon spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Veronica’s childhood memories of their farm in Nebraska include a happy moment with her father under the night sky where she expressed a desire to visit the moon with its forests because it looked lonely. Now it is 1923 and she and her husband are in a moon shuttle on their way to the Borrowfield Home for the Melancholy and a new beginning, free from her ungrateful selfish sadness. He has booked her in for expensive treatments involving experimental brain surgery and Moon Spider silk but we get the impression he is dumping her in the facility which can only be reached by shuttle and that he is signing her in for treatment 'until sane' to seize a new beginning for himself. The Moon Spider, believed to have psychic properties, spun its web throughout the forests and was worshipped by a group called the Alabaster Scholars. When it died the scholars continued to live in its lair and harness the power of the spider silk. Veronica is locked in small cell in the facility built over the lair and Doctor Cull, who calls himself ‘a surgeon of the mind’, repeatedly snips away at her brain to replace the ‘bad bits’ with a silk repair, while his assistant, Grub, cleans up.

With elements of gothic horror in a surreal setting Nathan Ballingrud’s elegant prose confidently leads us into a nightmare world where time and memory are manipulated. The horror does include tiny spiders crawling out of opened skulls, but the psychological drama is cleverly delivered on many levels as Veronica’s sense of self evolves. At just 88 pages this novella is surprisingly powerful and subtly thought provoking.

Themes: Horror, Brain surgery, Mental illness, Spiders.

Sue Speck