Interview with Award-Winning NC Author Nathan Ballingrud

Award-winning North Carolina author Nathan Ballingrud recently released Crypt of the Moon Spider, the first volume of an anticipated trilogy on TOR Nightfire.

Here is an excerpt of his interview on the Bookin' podcast (the rest of which can be heard here).

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Jason: Could you please take a moment, Nathan, to set this novel up for our readers?

Nathan: Sure. I should start by saying it's a novella. It's quite short.

It's around 22,000 words for roughly 100 pages.

It takes place in the early 1920s on the moon. The moon doesn't have any basis in scientific reality. You can breathe on it.

There are forests. The dark spots that we see through our telescopes that we now understand are basically large craters are in fact forests. And someone has set up a sanitarium to treat the mentally ill.

Our protagonist, Veronica Brinkley, is being essentially committed there by her husband because she is suffering from depression and he's a bit bored of it. And so we see her, we see her experience there. There is my version of a mad scientist who runs the place.

He is attended by a strange sect of people called the alabaster scholars, who apparently once worshiped a moon spider, a very giant spider who has died at some point. And those are the basic ingredients. Mayhem ensues.

Jason: As you mentioned, we open this book with our protagonist Veronica, who is traveling to a home for the treatment of the melancholy, which is on the dark side of the moon. And my question, Nathan, is what was the genesis of your invention of the Barrowfield Home for the Treatment of the Melancholy?

Nathan: A lot of things came together in my thoughts for this. One is just a great abiding love for pulp art.

The cover art of old genre mass market paperbacks, the covers of EC Horror comics like Weird Science and Vault of Horror, things like that. Just the garishness, the overtopness of it all is something I love a lot. And those kinds of images are always in my head.

I like to play with them, as well asthe cover art of the mid-20th century Gothic romances, where you would often have a picture of some woman running in the night away from a dark house or a dark looming edifice behind her. There might be one single window.

She may or may not have candelabra in her hand. And all those kinds of images just really lived in my heart for a long time. And that's where the first inklings of the story just came from, this idea of a lunar Gothic.

And so once they had the idea of a lunar Gothic, the idea of madness has long been tied to the moon. And so it seemed a natural next step for there to be an asylum of some sort on the moon. And just organically, one thing led quite naturally, in my mind anyway, to the other, until the Barrowfield Home appeared.

And Barrowfield itself, the idea of barrows, graves, and the Moon Spider has a crypt underneath where the home is built. So, it just felt like a very organic process.

Jason: What is the relationship between the moon and madness?

Nathan: Well, in real life, probably none. But in literature, in folklore, the moon has always been tied with madness or insanity. And this is, I think, most expressly illustrated in the werewolf myth, where the full moon will call out the beast inside. And, and even now, you talk to people who work in policing fields or in hospitals. They will tell you today that when there is a full moon, things are a little hairier out there.

So I say in real life nothing, but who knows? I might be wrong about that. I don't know.

But the tie has been there and it's been there probably as long as there has been a written word. So I just chose to exploit it.

More of this interview with Nathan Ballingrud can be heard here.

Crypt of the Moon Spider can be purchased here.

Nathan Ballingrud will be at the Wake Forest Lit Fest on October 12th at Page 158 Books. More info about the Wake Forest Lit Fest can be found here.