Well, this is something special! I've heard of Nathan Ballingrud because his short story collection, 'North American Lake Monsters' gets a lot of love online, but I haven't read it or any of his other books. After this, they're firmly on my priority list, even though this appears to be something very different to anything he's written before, something I'd have to categorise as weird fiction over a laundry list of other genres.
It starts out like a steampunk book, not because it's full of gears and gadgets because it isn't, but because it's exquisitely Victorian in tone. Veronica from Nebraska is suffering from "black spells" and visiting the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy; only to realise that her husband, a surgeon by trade and Man of Science, has effectively left her there to die. It's an obvious nod to Victorian asylums, where well-to-do families sent their broken children to preserve the illusion of normality in their elevated social circles.
Except it's 1923, so post-steampunk rather than dieselpunk, and Barrowfield Home is located just about as far away from society as possible, in the midst of a forest of spiderwebs on the dark side of the Moon. Of course, while that might sound outlandish, it's entirely appropriate for a novella clearly acknowledging the time-honoured connection between the Moon and madness. We call it lunacy for a reason.
It's all deliciously evocative in both visuals and tone, Ballingrud's language a real treat to read. I even found myself reading entire paragraphs aloud merely to hear them spoken, something I do on occasion but possibly not since Ursula K. Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' six years ago now. It's so evocative that I bemoan the fact that I have aphantasia so can't visualise images. I have to say that language and mood combined to render lunar landscapes and gothic buildings joyously easy to imagine anyway in other form. Those without such a limitation ought to see this like a movie in both the sense of watching it all unfold visually and also in the cinematic sense of how each frame is crafted.
The Brinkleys, Veronica and her surprisingly unnamed husband, are met by Charlie Duchamp, whom she starts to think of as Grub, with fair reason. The doctor in charge who's tasked with curing her affliction is Dr. Barrington Cull, hardly a surname to inspire any form of confidence in the delicate work of treating the mad. These names are pulpy, of course, but appropriately so for a book that decides to venture into the Victorian mad scientist genre in quintessentially weird fashion. If this had been pitched to 'Weird Tales' in the thirties and they'd dared to publish it without edits, the pulp fiction faithful would consider it a creature of legend. It would no doubt be talked about in hushed reverent tones decades on.
As it moves forward, from steampunk gothic into science fiction horror, the weird elements start to dominate. By the time we reach the twenty-page mark, we're being told poetic stories, like the one about the early Lunar prospectors who discovered the lair of a Moon Spider, a psychic native creature of gigantic proportions, and communed with it; transforming into an order of monks in white robes who call themselves the Alabaster Scholars and hide themselves away from mankind to cater to the Moon Spider's every need. This is the sort of story I might expect from Clark Ashton Smith, though his vocabulary would be more daunting.
I'll stop expanding my synopsis here, because this is a short novella that wraps up a breath under one hundred pages and you deserve to discover its outlandish marvels for yourselves. What I will say is that it continues to shift in tone and even genre, as if such details are meant to be fluid and ever-changing. The science fiction shifts into horror, as perhaps you might expect for mad science, but eventually become transformational body horror, which hails from a very different era to the ones I've mentioned thus far. There are some truly freaky scenes here and I can imagine readers of a sensitive nature needing a trip to Barrowfield Home after finishing them.
I utterly adored this book and I'm intensely happy that the counter to its frustratingly brief length is the realisation that it's the first in what will become a trilogy, dubbed 'Lunar Gothic'. I wonder what Ballingrud will trawl in for the other two instalments, the first of which will apparently have the title 'Cathedral of the Drowned'. For now, it's as if David Cronenberg had adapted 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' to film, with nods to 'Bedlam' and 'Psycho' and we're reading the novelisation by A. Merritt. How all that fits into a hundred pages boggles my mind, but it's done with beauty and delight in the outré, something that I thought had been lost to fiction decades ago.
I'm trying to remember what my favourite book of the year was up until this point, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore because it's 'Crypt of the Moon Spider'. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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