Welcome back to Books With Cause. Let’s dive straight into my latest review.
In this edition, I continue my ongoing mission of reading selections from Goodreads Horror Aficionados.
There’s an old adage about books, and I remember a story a reader asked an author. “How do you decide which stories are long and which ones are short?” The author replied: “The word count.” While the answer may seem flippant and facetious to some, it’s true. I believe that stories are living, breathing things. I believe that authors don’t have ideas. Ideas have authors. Ideas present themselves to the author, and at that point, the author is nothing more than the vessel that turns the abstract idea into words on a page.
That said, sometimes you can tell when the story might want to be a short story, and the author is treading water and padding out the word count. On the flip side, there are short stories that feel rushed in the execution, which probably should have been allowed more time and space to read. Somewhere in between are the books which are just right. A Goldilocks special. Not too long. Not too short. Just perfect in every way.
While the majority of the books I read are novels, every so often a novella or a collection of short stories comes my way. Crypt of the Moon Spider is a novella set in an alternate 1923 where the moon is habitable and covered in forests. Long ago, a giant, godlike spider lived beneath the surface, and its silk granted extraordinary mental abilities to its worshippers. The story follows Veronica Brinkley, a woman suffering from depression who is taken by her husband to a lunar asylum called the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy.
Veronica is abandoned at the home by her husband. He believes her to be mentally unwell and in dire need of treatment. The staff there performs – what I would liken to as – a lobotomy. They cut out a portion of the patient’s brain and replace it with silky webbing of the titular spider.
The lobotomy element alone instantly made me think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – a book I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read yet, but I’ve seen the film as well as a stage production with EastEnder Shane Ritchie in the lead role.
Crypt of the Moon Spider is a gothic science fiction about the loss of identity and manipulation of memory. I liked it. I just didn’t love it.
My Goodreads Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
