Crypt of the Moon Spider

In 1923, Veronica's husband leaves her at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. The asylum sits on the dark, forested side of the moon, and he has decided her depression is an inconvenience he will no longer manage. She wants to go home whole and happy.

Barrowfield is run by Dr. Cull, an ambitious director who has found a tribe of priests. Their ancestors served the Moon Spiders that once ruled the lunar caves. The priests' silk, woven into a patient's mind, appears able to cure conditions that nothing else touches.

Beneath the asylum, in its crypts, both the priests and the doctor have plans for Veronica. None of them has anything to do with healing.

This is gothic body horror, short and unsettling, and it belongs to the novella form. It is the first book in a planned Lunar Gothic trilogy. The material is grief and control, and what gets done to women's minds under the name of treatment. Expect a slim, dark read with an asylum's closed-in dread, set against a strange lunar backdrop.