Review: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud.

There is a subgenre of horror that seems to be aimed almost exclusively at horror readers. A subgenre that delights in the dark and the macabre. That plays with the tropes and is a celebration of subversion and corruption. It takes the material of horror and pushes it towards the fantastic. It leans into the unreal aspects of horror, losing some of what makes horror disturbing, but making a midnight feast of the deformed and the abominable. 

I think this work first shows up in the early days of pulp horror. Clark Ashton Smith’s delirious tales of vampires on Saturn and evil wizards from the end of time were a precursor. As was Lovecraft’s The Hound, celebrating the French decadent tales of sick perversity and corruption and the gothic tales of curses from beyond the grave. Then you see it move on to the modern day. Karl Edward Wagner’s story Sticks is a grue-filled pulp tale of the undead and the doomed. Thomas Ligotti’s tales like Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech or The Last Feast of Harlequin, are gothic fantasies of puppets controlled by puppets controlled by puppets hidden in darkness. Mark Samuels’s stories like The Court of Midnight or In The Complex are tales of diseased protagonists lost in a lunar delirium. What all these works share is a love of the horror genre, and are meant as literary celebrations of the dark genre which horror fans are obsessed with. They are not meant as an attack on the reader, in the usual horror sense, but as graveyard fun, reveling in what makes us sick and what makes us diseased.  Using the techniques of pulp with actual literary intentions, this is a subgenre that has hidden in shadow, only enjoyed by the true initiates. 

Now we have what I hope will be a kind of formal entry, giving these works some attention from more mainstream horror outlets of criticism and promotion. Crypt of the Moon Spider. Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider is a grotesquerie in the best way, a gothic pulp that shamelessly dives headfirst into sadistic doctors and lunar spider gods. A young woman, Veronica, is brought to a mental hospital on the Moon by her husband to try to cure her bleak melancholy. Set in the 1920’s, Crypt of the Moon Spider draws on classic pulp, literary noir, German expressionism, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and deliriums inspired by Clark Ashton Smith, and mixes it into an intoxicating brew of horrific delights. Also, I am reminded of the transgressive fairy tales and explicit dark fantasy of Clive Barker, like Imajica and The Hellbound Heart. 

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a delight. Creeping sadistic scientists, young women who may be insane or may be victims of manipulation, strange alien bodies emerging from human bodies, it is truly a love letter to the horror genre. It is the first in a proposed trilogy. Seeing as that is the case, is it hard to give it a definite review since it is the first of a series.  I will say that I wish the pace was slowed down a little, it moves at an extremely fast clip. Which I take to also be a call back to the pulp stories found in the classic horror magazines at the turn of the twentieth century. I would have liked to just exist in the scenes just a little longer and live with the characters a little bit more. But is that such a bad thing to have been left wanting more? I can not wait to see what Nathan does with the rest of the series. A masterpiece and a must-read. Highly recommended.