Ok, let me start off by saying that normally I don’t read horror.  I’m easily scared, and I can’t tolerate watching horror movies or reading most horror or thriller books.  But you guys, T. Kingfisher is just SO AMAZING that I gobble up every book that she writes, even when they keep me up at night!

The best thing about T. Kingfisher's books is her characters’ dry sense of wit.  Closely followed in order by the absurd positions that the author places her characters in.  Even in her horror books, rather than her fantasy books, I am constantly laughing out loud as I giddily highlight my favorite passages.  Kingfisher can WRITE her pants off, my fellow readers.  Her five (5!!) Hugo Awards are well-earned.

Here, we meet up again with Alex Easton in T. Kingsfisher’s Sworn Soldier series.  Alex is a nonbinary protagonist, a retired Gallacian soldier from a small rocky country of Ruritania.  Alex has already appeared in What Moves The Dead, a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, which was my very favorite book of 2022.  I ran around gushing about that book to anyone who would listen, and forced my whole book club to read it despite the fact that we normally do a very different kind of fiction, because it is just THAT GOOD.  

In the third of the series, WHAT STALKS THE DEEP, the pragmatic yet markedly funny Alex travels to America to assist their friend in looking for their missing friend, who may be lost in an abandoned and desperately spooky coal mine in West Virginia.  And did Alex mention that they are and is absolutely, positively not claustrophobic?!  The culprit(s) is/are deliciously inventive and marvelously chilling.  While this book can be appreciated on its own, why would you want to deprive yourself of the delight of the full series??  T. Kingfisher’s WHAT STALKS THE DEEP delivers spine-chillingly glorious suspense, subtle body politics, and delightful humor that you should grab and clutch to your bosom right now.