Leanne Olson

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Releasing July 12, 2022 from Tor Nightfire

Thanks to T. Kingfisher and this book, I’m now terrified of hares.

What Moves the Dead is such a wonderful little surprise.  It’s a novella that mixes dread and humour perfectly, and managed to make me care about the characters and scare the pants off me in under 200 pages.

What Moves the Dead is an expansion of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, adding in body horror, the history of a fake country, and a witty nonbinary hero.

Alex Easton is a retired soldier who receives a letter from their old friend Madeline Usher, who is dying from a mysterious ailment.  Alex (and their wonderful horse, Hob) travels to the home of Madeline and her brother Roderick to try to help.

There, Alex meets a British woman studying fungi, a very American doctor, and several hares that seem to watch Alex.  And there’s something wrong with the way they move.

(I finished this one after midnight and then unfortunately my dog wanted out in the backyard to chase rabbits.  No thank you.)

Kingfisher captures so much of what I loved in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, but with a completely different tone (much funnier), a late-19th century gothic setting, and a warm cast of characters.  I loved this weird little novella.

Thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for the review copy of What Moves the Dead.