Published July 12, 2022 by Tor Nightfire
What Moves the Dead is Kingfisher's 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.
T. Kingfisher could write an encyclopedia that I'd want to read, so when I saw that What Moves The Dead was a revamping of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", I was giddy with excitement. Yes, giddy. I said what I said. Instead of a regurgitated version, Kingfisher has added her own reconception to Poe's short story and it's a doozy.
As with Poe, Kingfisher begins her tale with a first-person narrative. However, unlike Poe and his exceptionally vague male protagonist, Lieutenant Alex Easton is a genderqueer retired soldier friend of the female Usher—a deviation from Poe's who is a friend of the male sibling. Kingfisher has also made the addition of a female mycologist, an American doctor, as well as various townspeople, to complete the cast. Though I have to admit Angus, the Scottish personal assistant of Lt. Easton, was a personal favorite.
Kingfisher always crafts her stories with creeping dread and from the beginning pages, she molds (pun not intended but in this case, highly appropriate) this inspired tale with care. The Usher property is blooming with nasty, foul-smelling mushrooms, the manor house is crumbling and filled with mildew and decay, and the Ushers themselves are pallid skeletal things. None of that is anything new. Oh, but the hares. If nothing else will give you the heebie-jeebies in this story, the hares will. You know that feeling you get while watching horror movies, where a person skitters around on all fours or jerkily ambulates—familiar but thoroughly alien? Kingfisher must dream of that feeling because she excels at writing the wrongness of things.
It's like Kingfisher took a look at Poe's narrative and decided to complete all of the gaps, mapping out the dark corners and watery lake depths. She scaffolded onto the original with a light touch, melding some gratifying humor and wit with the expected gothic conventions. However, if you were a fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, you'll be over the moon to know that this is also a fungal horror. Undeniably, Kingfisher gives us the answers to the questions that plagued us after finishing the original. Poe's version left the reader with so many interpretations and very little solid evidence. Kingfisher doesn't wait for the House of Usher to break atwain; She lights it on fire and watches it burn.