T. Kingfisher blows my socks off with her retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in WHAT MOVES THE DEAD. I am not normally a fan of horror or gothic tales, but I love T. Kingfisher’s writing, so I jumped on the chance to check out this horror short story. This delightfully chilling tale creeps me out beyond belief while making me laugh all the while.
Kingfisher has won Hugo and Nebula awards for her writing, and rightfully so. Her prose is so lyrical and evocative. I highlighted the crap out of this book, finding gems on nearly every page. As an angsty teen, I loved Edgar Allen Poe’s works. Kingfisher improves greatly on Poe’s original work, fleshing it out with deliciously macabre elements and some well-rounded secondary characters.
The narrator is Alex Easton, a gender-neutral officer who befriended twins Roderick and Madeline Usher as children. Alex served with Roderick in the recent European war, and is called by Roderick to see Madeline before her anticipated death. Alex is the star of the story, with such a beautifully dry wit that I am constantly chuckling in wry amusement.
The Usher house and the surrounding environs are practically a character in and of themselves, moldering with fungus and practically malevolent. Alex must risk life and health as they work to unravel the dark secret that is subsuming the house of Usher and its inhabitants. Lovers of horror will revel in this harrowing tale of rot, madness, and exquisite tension. Kingfisher’s WHAT MOVES THE DEAD is evocative and delectably disturbing.
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.
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