165 pages
Published 2022
Read from January 18 to January 19
Rating: 4 out of 5
The obvious point of comparison here is Mexican Gothic. In the author's note at the end, Kingfisher recounts how she wrote the first 10k words of What Moves the Dead before she read Mexican Gothic, and despaired: "[W]hat can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" But while Kingfisher's fungal retelling of "The Fall of the House of Usher" doesn't quite match Mexican Gothic's sense of decadent and decaying atmosphere, What Moves the Dead has its own vaguely Ruritanian charms, plus a wonderfully realized gender-expansive narrator in Lieutenant Easton, and enough creepy hares to populate a foggy Gothic heathland. (The creepiness potential of the hare has been seriously under-explored in horror fiction.)
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