Saturday Review: “The Baroque Power of Nathan Ballingrud’s New Novella,” a review by Dale Bailey, forthcoming in NCLR Online Winter 2025 of Nathan Ballingrud’s novella Crypt of the Moon Spider (2024).
“Crypt presents itself as a heady concoction of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror, but it is actually something far more interesting. It’s a gothic novel of the purest kind…” Regular reviewer Dale Bailey writes, “Nathan Ballingrud’s stunning new novella . . . establishes both the core aesthetic of the story itself and its place in the longer arc of Ballingrud’s career, which is every bit as stunning – consistently stunning – as this slim book, which at a mere eighty-five pages packs more power, beauty, and human insight than most novels three times its length.”
Bailey’s review highlights Ballingrud’s unconventional setting for his new work of science fiction: “Now consider two further points. One, the novella . . . is set in 1923, utterly undermining our initial assumption that we are reading a conventional, albeit beautifully written, science fiction story. . . . Two, by setting his story in an era when interplanetary travel was clearly not possible, Ballingrud suspends us in a state of utter epistemological uncertainty: could it be that the moon really is “the inhabited skull of a long dead god” ”.
Read the review here now! And order the book from the publisher or at your local independent bookstore.
