Crypt of the Moon Spider is a dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs.

Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.

It's now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull's invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they're so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.

But patients aren't the only ones with trouble on their minds, and although the spider's been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre...It's horrifying, but there's beauty. --The New York Times
One of the field's most accomplished short story writers. --The Washington Post

A gripping collection of six stories of terror--including the novella The Visible Filth, the basis for the upcoming major motion picture--by Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado--one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there (The Verge).

In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his piercing and merciless (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives--both real and imagined: What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition (Los Angeles Review of Books).

Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in The Butcher's Table, Ballingrud's beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Love has a terrible power over our our lives: it distorts, corrupts, drives, or redeems us.

A Locus Award Finalist
Stretches the boundaries of the genre. --The New York Times

1931, New Galveston, Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt's gang who have stolen her mother's voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance in this page-turner (Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun) from Nathan Ballingrud.

Since Anabelle's mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father's diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher, as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and the harsher realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud's brilliant (Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World) novel is haunting in its evocation of Annabelle's quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.

Nathan Ballingrud's stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and the Hulu series Monsterland, The Strange is his first novel.

The sequel to Crypt of the Moon Spider, Cathedral of the Drowned is a dripping, squirming, scuttling tale of altered bodies and minds.

There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp. One is a brain in a jar, stranded on Jupiter's jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home. The other is hanging on the wall of Barrowfield Home on Earth's own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage.

On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called The Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronauts inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while a new Moon Spider prepares to hatch.

Where is the real Leeds? How does one get there? Is it floating on the air-words and music you can almost reach out and grab like wriggling worms of sound and ether? Is it in the carnival that seethes under the corrupted church, drawing the lost along shadowy corridors and through the strangely angled Funhouse doors to the place where the city fathers perform secret rites with the goat-headed masters of the dark? Do you seek the Real Leeds? Venture out to a secluded spot, turn on your radio, and spin that dial down to the murky low numbers, somewhere just around 87.9... That music, that voice calling on the edge of static and distortion-it might lead you to that blasted and damned path toward the Real and Truest heart of Leeds, Massachusetts. This is WXXT. It's the witching hour, when shadows take wing and nightmares stalk. Turn your radio up. Point your antennas to the infinite sky. And stay tuned for Weather on the Sixes. WXXT. The bubbling blisters on the tongue of the Pioneer Valley.

Previously published as North American Lake Monsters. Monsterland is a new anthology TV series from Hulu based on Nathan Ballingrud's striking, bleak, and luminous debut collection, starring Kaitlyn Dever, Kelly Marie Tran, Jonathan Tucker, and Taylor Schilling, and more.

Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award winning collection of gothic and uncanny stories investigates the loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary American life. Ballingrud's stories are love stories. They're also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves. Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, ex-wives--or the faces we see in our mirrors.

The people in these stories, ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids seduced by extremism, are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they're ruined; sometimes redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, terrifyingly human, even at their most monstrous.