Crumbling estates, creepy wildlife, and insidious fungi — T. Kingfisher expands on Poe’s classic tale. The first half of the book was slow going, but it picked it halfway through and I didn’t want to put it down! I found Kingfisher’s descriptions of the hares living around the House of Usher deeply unsettling. There were bits that were quite reminiscent of Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, which the author acknowledges. Overall, it’s a quick, unsettling read that fans of the Gothic and Horror genres will enjoy.

Everything T. Kingfisher touches turns to immaculate horror story gold, and this book is no exception. It hits that sweet spot between just a genuinely fun retelling of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (as well as a fantastic addition to the gothic horror genre), and something so so much more. Kingfisher has a talent for really setting the scene and atmospheric dread that really gets you into the book. Despite the fact that it was so short, I absolutely LOVED the characters and was impressed by how well-fleshed out they were. Kingfisher falls back on familiar gothic horror character tropes (the American, the Nervous Gentleman, the Sickly, Waifish Lady, and the Soldier) but gives them such a great history and spin that it takes everything I already love about the genre and makes it even BETTER. I'm trying not to give away any spoilers, but I will say that this book will keep you up at night and you won't look at *redacted* the same way ever again.

For those who liked Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (which Kingfisher pays homage to in the Author's Note), you are going to LOVE this book.

Did I download this book and proceed to read the whole thing in one sitting? Perhaps. It’s been a long, long time since I read Fall of the House of Usher, so I went into this story blind. I absolutely loved it! Kingfisher created such a vivid and atmospheric setting that I truly felt unsettled while reading this book. She gave such life to the crumbling Usher manor and the eerie countryside that I truly felt like I was there along with Easton. And the horror! There were some truly horrific scenes, especially when it comes to body horror. I would have noped right out of there well before the crypt scenes.

I loved all of Kingfisher’s characters, especially Easton. Always here for the inclusion of nonbinary main characters! Even in the face of the dangerous unknown they still managed to keep things humorous and moving. We saw brief glimpses into Easton’s backstory, but they never took away from the storyline or slowed the pace. Mrs. Potter was also a particular delight and so easy to imagine. All of the characters felt truly fleshed out and interesting. My heart hurt for the Ushers.

This was my first T. Kingfisher and it definitely won’t be my last. I cannot wait to check out her backlog books, but I will also be revisiting Poe in the meantime.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for this ARC!

the fall of the house of usher is my favourite Poe story, so when Nightfire reached out to me to offer an advanced review copy of this retelling, I was elated. I had high expectations going in, and “What Moves The Dead” did not disappoint. I read it in one sitting.

The pacing was perfect. There is a lot of descriptive writing and attention to detail, which is imperative for any Poe retelling. For example, Kingfisher emphasizes the importance of the setting by describing it in depth. The prose doesn’t take away from the story’s progression; instead, it coexists with the plot and contributes to the creepiness.

As for the story itself, it was more unsettling than outright scary, and the ending was predictable, but I loved the explanation for Madeline’s death. The characters were more fleshed out than their original counterparts, and the nonbinary representation was refreshing.

Thanks to T. Kingfisher, 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.

I went in blind and loved this so much. It so scary because you realize that it’s not so far from the realm of possibility.

This is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and it was as creepy as you can expect from T. Kingfisher novel. Kingfisher’s use of atmosphere and eerie quiet made this book sneak up on me.

Alex Easton finds out their childhood friend is dying and they immediately head for her estate in Ruritania. Alex wasn’t at all expecting what they find upon arrival. Something about the landscape is strange. The vegetation, mainly the grotesque fungal growth around the dark and insidious lake is cause for concern. And when they arrive inside their friends’ ancestral home, they find their old friends, the ailing Madeline and her brother Roderick, who looks ill himself.

She is deteriorating fast, but at night they find her sleepwalking and muttering strange words in an eerie voice. What is Alex to do? Especially when they cannot make heads or tales of what could be causing Madeline to fade the way she has.

Kingfisher has added new characters and has gone into more detail about certain aspects of the original story and it was transcendent! So many details that Poe didn’t address are entertained in this book, resulting in a horrific and rapidly building story of nature and possession. Amazing!

I loved this book.

I've been a fan of T. Kingfisher's work for a few years. 2019's The Twisted Ones is one of my favorite horror stories of all time. 2020's The Hollow Places was one of those "perfect book at the right time" books for me. I was just going through a divorce and The Hollow Places made me feel seen and made sense of some of the feelings I was struggling to voice. I will always be thankful to Kingfisher for writing that book. Both of those books were adaptations/homages/inspired by horror short stories from the past. The Twisted Ones was an homage to Machen's The White People and The Hollow Places was an homage/spiritual sequel to Blackwood's The Willows. What Moves the Dead is a similar homage to Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and just like its predecessors is a fantasic read that will be added to my list of favorite horror stories.

The general premise of What Moves the Dead is that Easton, the main character has been summoned by their friend Madeline Usher to the Usher ancestral home. When they arrive, Easton finds their friend and their friend's brother apparently deathly ill. However, other strange things are occurring as well. Both Ushers are behaving strangely, there are bizarre and exotic fungus everywhere and...well...there's some really weird hares. Over the course of the novella, these elements blend together to result in climax that is just as riveting as both of the aforementioned earlier books from Kingfisher and might even surpass them in terms of quality.

Beyond characterization (which continues to be one of the areas in which T. Kingfisher far surpasses most writers) the setting for this book was astounding and was incredibly vivid. As I read this book, I felt the decay that was described in the Usher home and I felt the eerieness and outlandishness of the strange happenings around that home. Also Kingfisher is one of the best at writing animals. Alongside the dog in The Twisted Ones and the stuffed otter in The Hollow Places, Easton's horse is now one of my favorite fictional animals. Also the hares were fascinating and are image that is going to rattle in my head for a long time to come.

I'm super excited for others to get the chance to read this book and I think this book continues to prove that Kingfisher is at the top of the pack for writers of horror stories with a lot of heart.

This is a quick fun retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." I loved Kingfisher's unique take on the story that will appeal to fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Jeff VanderMeer. I recommend this to both teen and adult readers who want a creepy book that will live under your skin for a long while.

Despite my mega-queasiness, my high school self begged me to pick up this Edgar Allan Poe retelling of Fall of the House of Usher. It was pretty horrifying, but my GOD this book was fantastic. The main character was incredible, I loved the acknowledgments section, the whole story was wild, I flew through it.

I gave this horror novella a 3/5 star rating. I’ve never read such a short horror story before and the premise was fascinating! The descriptions of how the fungi were disturbing the forest animals and humans alike was chilling and made this story feel infinitely more real somehow. This book releases on July 12, 2022 and I would highly recommend this to anyone, especially those of you who want to dabble in the horror genre but are too intimidated to pick up a 400-page book!

My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC copy of this book available to me.

This short novel is a very nice reworking of Poe's "House of Usher" story, set in the 1890's but with some new characters to help the plot along. Still a tale of horror, but also a tale of non-conformity in a time perhaps a bit more restrictive than ours today. Kingsolver never fails to give us entertaining stories, as this one shows so well.

Really great story, thought J knew where it was going, but totally surprised me. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book

I thoroughly enjoyed that. I was worried it would feel overdone, basing itself on the Poe story, but was a fresh-feeling retelling. Mostly this book was completely, thoroughly charming! I highly recommend for Poe lovers and dark fairy tale readers.

When Maddie's head flops around on her shoulders...gasp, OMG!, is my own head on straight? Slimy strings of goo come out of fish anuses (worse than the usual stuff in fish poo) and there's not a dustpan in the world big enough to contain all the little white hairs shedding everywhere. Speaking of hares, there are icky zombie jerking rabbits that stare and stare and stare.

I know crowds will throw mold covered tomatoes at me, but I have to say it. T. Kingfisher's version of The Fall of the House of Usher is better than Poe's. Don't show up at my house with pitchforks and torches. What Moves the Dead is that good.

Gore and mushrooms. An amazing strong and interesting female secondary character and mushrooms. Wit and humor amongst the slime and mushrooms. Fantastic main characters, fantastic secondary characters and mushrooms. A really cool horse. Did I mention mushrooms? You don't want to make an omelet with these babies, not unless you want to find a fungus among us.

T. Kingfisher is one of my favorite authors. One of the reasons is that in all of her books, family, friends, even newly met people work together and are fond of each other. No snarking and insulting that seem to haunt so many books today. A story can be frightening, bloody and gross and still have pleasant characters. The fellowship between characters is wonderful to behold with a subtle humor running under the grim business. Easton is the kind of friend everyone should have. Even the interactions with Hob the horse are charming.

And yet the story is so very scary. It will make you take bleach to that little patch of mold in the corner of the bathroom sooner rather than later. After all, that fungus is creeping, creeping your direction.

I love this book and I'm grateful to Netgalley, T.Kingfisher, and Tor/Nightfire for allowing me to read and review an eARC of What Moves the Dead.

What Moves the Dead is another standout entry in T. Kingfisher's already impressive horror portfolio, with her inspiration for the story this time being Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." A letter telling of Madeline Usher's frightfully declining health sent to ex-soldier Alex Easton summons them to the unfortunate and decrepit manse of the Usher family, with whom they were close childhood friends. All is not well in the crumbling home, of course, and dark secrets will challenge Alex's grasp on what is possible and put true terror into their heart.

This is an excellent gothic horror story with well-written and fully realized characters that immediately endear you to them and their plight. When the extent of the terror is revealed readers will not be disappointed, though they might be extremely grossed out.

I love "The Fall of the House of Usher" by EAP, and this retelling is genuinely phenomenal. Kingfisher successfully makes the characters all feel real, which makes this retelling somehow feel even creeper and off-putting. The writing is genuinely stunning and incredibly emotional, genuinely it's such a rush to read with how nerve-wracking the story is and how gorgeous the prose is.

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for providing me with this advance reader copy.

Description from NetGalley:
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 love “The Fall of the House of Usher'' by Edgar Allen Poe, and I also love this retelling. Let’s start with the characters because they feel like real people. Their backgrounds and relationships are explained and used to good effect. The atmosphere is so creepy and aids the plot tremendously is the short span one has with the book. I do wish I had more, but the length is probably a good length for the plot and horror, not to mention it is a retelling of a short story. The cover is also stunning. Bravo to the artist!

This is a fantastic and horrifying retelling. 4.5/5

In <i>What Moves the Dead</i>, T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) remixes Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and it is delightfully creepy, wonderful gothic horror. I read it, immediately went and reread "The Fall of the House of Usher" (which I hadn't read since jr high or high school and now is available online in several places for free because it's out of copyright), and then I read <i>What Moves the Dead</i> all over again to savor the depth and texture of Kingfisher's work.

I've loved her writing since <i>Summer in Orcus</i> with few exceptions, and I open each one of her new works with an open heart, ready to love. This one brings the best of her naturalist sensibilities, the richness of actual Gothic & Southern Gothic lit, the entertaining spark of European multiculturalism (including an improbable American transplant), and a core conceit rooted in Poe's imagination together into something greater than its parts. I almost wish it were a full novel, although that would take it far beyond Poe's short story and possibly make it unrecognizable.

I loved the original characters, especially Miss Potter, and Easton's culture is one I would. love to know more about/see again. I loved the the linguistics asides and how deftly drawn were Easton's core assumptions about her tiny country and the world. The elements of nature were vividly detailed and, not to spoil, but I had visceral reactions where appropriate. :g:

I find novellas hard to rate because I nearly always want to take off a star for wishing it were longer, which isn't really fair to the form. So I'm going to call it 4 1/2 stars.


CW for animal harm.

Deeply unsettling, stomach turning, and made my hair stand on end. I really enjoyed T. Kingfisher's take on Poe's work, and Alex Easton was the most endearing, delightfully 19th-century protagonist, with such an engaging sense of humor and a compelling backstory. The prose was lush, evocative, but at no point excessive. I felt like every word was put forth with intention. Kingfisher masterfully gives you enough information to sate your hunger for world-building, but not so much that it eats up most of the novella.

When the plot and the horror ramped up after about the midway point, I went from enjoying the novella to being utterly ensnared by it. I couldn't put this down and I would highly recommend it to any Poe or horror/gothic fan.

Many thanks to Tor Nightfire and Netgalley for the ARC.

What Moves the Dead is a deliciously wonderful and incredibly rich gothic and atmospheric novel, so well built and fast paced that I wasn't able to put it down till I reached the end. I was absolutely captivated by the atmosphere, and the characters.

This novel submerges the reader in a landscape so imaginative and detailed that the information of the world building/plot never feels forced, and is never difficult to understand or picture in one's mind. I had an enjoyable time reading this and it held my attention the entire way through that I finished it within the day! I enjoyed every page and thought that the plot/story was very unique. Would recommend to anyone, especially to those who love a little creepiness in their lives…