What Moves the Dead

I'm just going to bring it up because it's, you know, tis the season.

Earlier in the year I read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, which is, for anyone who doesn't know, a retelling of The Fall of the House of Ushers.

Is that right? Jen, I can feel like your face is judging me.

Okay, cool.

It's very atmospheric and all-consuming, and I really loved it.

I did a similar sort of thing that I did with the Daisy Johnson, the hotel, where I read it straight through one night.

And, yeah, there's a bit with the rabbits moving weirdly and which sort of slowly sort of transcends into, like, somebody being possessed by the same sort of dark matter uh that moves their bodies very strangely that's really disturbing i don't know what that is that's a very specific like thing to spook you as well when things move weirdly like you know when you think about in horror movies like things scuttling like people scuttling along the floor or like moving in really unnatural ways um it did a really good job of like sort of uh painting that picture and um yeah anyway so what moves the dead I would probably give I'm just going to do a little pumpkin review here I feel like that was like a three and a half maybe pumpkin to me.

Like it was very atmospheric, bit spooky, probably could have done the dark shower afterwards.

The next book does something very similar with another absolute titan of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.

We have What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, coming in at 162 pages.

Such a great reimagining.

This is a direct reimagining of Poe's classic, The Fall of the House of Usher.

Um, you've read more of her work than I have, I believe.

I'm, I've really only read What Moves the Dead, and that's about, uh, that's about it.

Yeah.

Um, so the whole Den Suriel plot, um, could, maybe should have been removed-

It is.

T. Kingfisher's novella What Moves the Dead is a direct retelling of Poe's classic The Fall of the House of Usher.

Which historically is the furthest thing from cozy you can imagine.

Poe's original text is the absolute definition of psychological decay, madness, and unrelenting macabre gloom.

It grounds them.

It creates a foundation of competence.

Plus, the novella is remarkably tight, only about 160 pages.

It doesn't drag the reader through endless chapters of agonizing despair.