WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, mycological nightmare fodder

WHAT MOVES THE DEAD
T. KINGFISHER
Nightfire Books
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five
WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL!


The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've marked this as a story with "transgender representation," and although that is a way of seeing Alex Easton I don't know of it's one ka would approve of. I could simply be another American man committing a dreadful solecism in kan opinion. Oh well.

Now. On to the bad, awful, hideous, nightmarish stuff.

You've most likely read "The Fall of the House of Usher" at some point in your school career/teenaged glooms. (Not-Americans even know about this story, and I understand it's popular among Poe's French-speaking admirers.) So did T. Kingfisher, and did she have questions after reading it! Wowee toledo.

Alex Easton, our narrator-cum-PoV person, has a strangely English name and a uniquely different cultural outlook. Ka was born female and swore into the life of a soldier, an ungendered occupation among kan fellow countrymen. I suspect it wasn't uncommon for warrior societies to have permeable gender boundaries given that not all man-plumbed persons are suited to soldiering and not all woman-plumbed persons are suitable to motherhood. Those being the basic occupations of the sexes for much of human history, it would surprise me greatly if most didn't have some kind or sort of accommodation to this reality. I believe the warrior graves with female bodies in them discovered all over Europe and Asia are an indicator of this.

Easton, as ka is known to the Usher siblings ka knew in distant childhood and youth, has at last emerged from soldiering...one senses unwillingly...now that peace has returned. A letter from kan friend Madeline Usher brings ka at the trot: "Roderick thinks I am dying." For one thing, bonds that old...and ka was Roderick's commander during the war, to boot...can't be gainsaid. Off ka, and kan batman Angus, and kan horse Hob (all well-sketched characters of great sensitivity in their portrayal) trot to the Ushers' ancestral home in neighboring Ruravia (!) to Do What Needs Doing.

Thus the nightmare begins. Ka finds Roderick a wisp, Madeline a cold shell of her former lovely self, and Roderick's American friend Denton...whose soldiering was done in the Civil War, in a medical tent. Despite kan poor opinion of Americans, this earns him a degree of latitude for being gauche and unfamiliar with how to treat sworn soldiers like ka. (That little pronoun, in kan Gallacian language, is used for both sexes of sworn soldiers. Tidily solves the vexed problem of gendered soldiery.) Alex finds Denton, and the English language, adequate but frustratingly unsophisticated, leading to kan delightful outburst, "Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things."

I relate, my soul sibling Alex. I so so relate.

I don't think it helps anything to recapitulate "The Fall of the House of Usher." I am aware that some people haven't read it, though honestly I find that easier to conceptualize than to understand. Let's just say that the mycohorror subgenre that's come into being and has fetidly overgrown the various horror and adjacent literary fields...Annihilation and its siblings, The Girl with All the Gifts, on and on...have been gazumped (from German gesumpf, tossed into a swamp) by T. Kingfisher's lighter, brighter touch and inimitable ability to slosh humor over a rankly rotting, unnaturally ambulating, little-white-hyphae-shedding Object of Horror, and not have the results resemble a desecrated grave.

I loved the read. I think most people I know would at the very least like it. And, fellow old-enough-to-remember souls, I think Denton the American is a call-out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can't prove it...the author doesn't mention it in her self-deprecating endnotes...but I found myself humming "Denton, Denton/you've got no pretensions" every time he hove into view.

...wait...what are those little white...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE