TL;DR: As a middle entry that still stands alone, this sits near the top of the year’s novella-length weird for readers who want muscular, intimate cosmic horror. It extends the Lunar Gothic project without losing its street-level heat, and it proves Ballingrud can make big, chewy images work at crime-novel speed. He welds dockside noir to Jovian nightmare biology and makes it feel both pulpy and numinous. What lands is the creature logic and atmosphere, with a clean crime spine that keeps the weird moving. Memorable and proudly strange. Read if you want lunar crime soaked in cosmic rot.

In 1924 Red Hook, crime boss Goodnight Maggie controls the docks by trafficking moonsilk, a lunar substance that acts like a dream-drug and neural mesh. A rival Mafia faction murders one of her boys, and a ruined Dr. Barrington Cull returns from his offworld asylum begging for help while hinting at a catastrophe on the moon. Maggie’s enforcer Charlie has been split by Cull into two beings: a brutal body left on the moon and a gentle mind fired across space inside a spiky satellite. That satellite crash-lands on Io near a wrecked rocket-cathedral, where drowned clergy serve a vast centipede intelligence called the Bishop. Maggie needs Charlie back to survive on Earth; the Bishop wants eyes, minds, and memory. The stakes are simple and sharp: save your crew, or be digested by something that prays to itself.

The Bishop isn’t just a monster; it is an ecology of possession that pilots corpses for their eyes and craves new ways of seeing. The moonsilk is both drug and wiring, a creepy biological internet that ferries memory, hunger, and prayer. Charlie’s “soft half” rides in a satellite brain-jar, crashes beside a rocket-church, then plugs into a severed priest’s neck so the sphere becomes a face. That’s pulp and philosophy in one shot. Where a lot of modern cosmic horror hides behind fog, this book uses clean, noir-forward scaffolding. It scratches the Annihilation itch but swaps misty awe for heat, hunger, and a gangster’s need to act.

Ballingrud toggles between flinty crime diction and star-drunk lyricism without wobble. A sentence will snap like a switchblade, then slip into cathedral hush. POV choices include Maggie, Charlie, and even the Bishop, keeping the humanity hot while letting the weird bloom; the Bishop’s inner “Loam” is a tactile cosmology, not an exposition dump. Set pieces escalate cleanly. Maggie’s shark-jaw office is a little theater of power. The Io cathedral, with its bell tolling out of rhythm and its flooded crypt, is a full stage for corruption and worship. “A gibbous white shard. A pitiless light.” That four-beat pairing hardens the moon into a weapon and sets the book’s moral temperature. The story sprints early, exhales on the crossing to Io, then tightens for a bruising final movement; one middle transfer lingers a hair long, but momentum returns when the Bishop takes the wheel. Titled sections and compact chapters read like loaded vignettes; typography is straightforward, built for propulsion over ornament.

Moonsilk refracts every power struggle: Maggie hoards it to hold a neighborhood; the Church tried to export God on booster rockets; the Bishop wants eyes the way men want dominion. Charlie’s literal split turns a common noir dilemma into body-philosophy: can violence and tenderness coexist, or must one get launched into space. The tilted cathedral is a tomb for missionary certainty. The drowned clergy worship the thing that outlived their sermon, and the Bishop’s self-adoration is the cosmic echo of human institutions that confuse their own reflection for truth. The aftertaste is brackish awe. The image that sticks is a bell tolling in a rain-black nave while something smart and hungry learns to see through our dead.

Daring creature design, a sharp noir chassis, and sticky, singular images earn it standout status; a slightly airy middle keeps it short of the pantheon, but it’s absolutely one to champion.

Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud, published October 21, 2025 by Tor Nightfire.