T. Kingfisher: What Moves the Dead (Hardcover, 2022, Tor Nightfire)
First edition, 160 pages
Published July 11, 2022 by Tor Nightfire.
From T. Kingfisher, the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones, comes What Moves the Dead, a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
Great retelling of the classic Poe story, with some actual horrific moments. While some elements were pretty obvious, it was still gripping and Kingfisher managed to keep it not too long, while also extending the original store which was actually too short!
So, it's not very scary or anything. It also has soldiers, which often makes me dislike stories. But ah. This one is exactly right for me. It has the right kind of mushrooms and queerness and feminism and I enjoyed so many little details in it.
It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others. Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare. My nerve broke and I ran.
First off, this isn't the sort of story you should read when your neighborhood is bunny central, no more morning tea saying softly good morning to them anymore.
Inspired by Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Alex is back from the war and going to their friend's house in the country to check on childhood friends. They received a letter from Roderick claiming that his sister Madeline has fallen ill. When …
It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others. Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare. My nerve broke and I ran.
First off, this isn't the sort of story you should read when your neighborhood is bunny central, no more morning tea saying softly good morning to them anymore.
Inspired by Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Alex is back from the war and going to their friend's house in the country to check on childhood friends. They received a letter from Roderick claiming that his sister Madeline has fallen ill. When they get there, they meet Miss Potter in the country side studying mushrooms, as the area has a multitude of varieties, and a severally ill Madeline, not looking to great himself Roderick, and an American doctor. Alex likes to take the piss out of the doctor in their thoughts: I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them. and Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American. So there's some touches of humor in the first half until things start to deteriorate.
“I hear things now,” he said. “Everything. My own heartbeat. Other people’s breathing sounds like thunder. Sometimes I fancy I can hear the worms in the rafters.”
I have to say that I know the author is setting the scene and working to build the suspense but I still thought the first half read fairly slow and it was hard to put myself in the late 1800s mindset of not really knowing what was going on when the mushroom, fungi, and the like is dripping down the walls. I also thought it was a little too convenient that Miss Potter was in the neighborhood, an expert in the field to explain everything; unluckiest luckiest people in this house. This is a little shorter page count, 150ish pages, so while you're introduced to the characters and get some of their personality, Alex, who is telling the story all from their pov, is the only one you really get to know. At the halfway point, when things go south for Madeline, is where I thought the story really picked up.
“What if I told you those were growing out of human skin?”
The second half had some great horror visuals, bunnies with heads half blown off getting up, crawling around, and eyeballing people, and other scenes did give me the creeps and will linger in my mind. I was thinking a two or three star rating and the second half bumped it up to four stars to almost 5. We do get an explanation as to what was going on, a horror taking care of business scene, and then an ending that does and doesn't quite sit well with you that everything will be all right now. If you've been missing episodes of The Last of Us, this would be a great quick story to tied you over.
Without being too spoilery, I never, when I started reading this book, thought I would finish it feeling pity for a fungus, but here we are.
I love Poe, and Usher is one of my favorite stories of his, and this retelling is absolutely masterful. The descriptions of the grounds and house are atmospheric and almost dripping with dread, which fills every page from page one and grows slowly, but incessantly, until you reach the end.
Content warning mild spoilers for the whole book
I found The Fall Of The House Of Usher intriguing but ultimately frustrating, and judging by the author's note at the end of this book, so did Ursula Vernon. Her reworking does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the original while filling it out to be much more of a satisfying story, with clearer reasons behind what happens and much more compelling characters.
I love how the narrator has so much of their own story, and it's mostly made relevant to the core story of the book. And the mystery aspect is very well done, with that tantalising sense that we as readers are just slightly ahead of Easton & Denton in figuring out what's going on and what will have to happen. I also appreciated how Roderick gets to be more of an actor in this telling rather than a pure victim, and I'm intrigued by the ambiguity of whether Madeline also is one or whether we're purely hearing from the fungus towards the end of the book. It must be tempting when writing a story that fills in so many gaps from the original to fill in every gap, and I think stopping short of doing that was a very good move.
Creepier version of Edgar Allan Poe's story of The Fall of the House of Usher.
