I think everyone remembers the first book they ever read in their favorite genre. Writers especially. The story that got you into writing whatever it is you write will always be special. Those early influences, the stories that made you the writer you are – they stick with you. And for me, one of those was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” So I was beyond excited to read T. Kingfisher’s adaptation of Poe’s classic story, What Moves the Dead. And it did not disappoint.

This review is almost completely spoiler free, but there was one issue toward the end of the book that I had to lightly spoil in order to properly discuss. However, the first few sections of this review are free of spoilers, and I tried to keep the one spoiler I did include fairly vague.

The Premise

If you’ve read “Fall of the House of Usher,” you know what to expect already. But it’s absolutely not a prerequisite for enjoying this book.

What Moves the Dead centers around Alex Easton, retired soldier, as they pay a visit to their childhood friends, the Ushers. Madeline Usher is dying of a mysterious illness, and her brother Roderick isn’t looking too well himself. Easton’s stay with the Ushers descends quickly in to the mysterious and macabre as the various guests of the Ushers race to uncover the truth, and stop it from destroying them.

Adaptation is hard

Despite the fact that both Poe’s original story and T. Kingfisher’s rendition of it are both in a written medium, short stories and novels are two very different beasts, and What Moves the Dead deserves praise for how well it rises to the challenge of adaptation.

I actually hadn’t re-read “Fall of the House of Usher” in quite some time before picking up What Moves the Dead. I definitely had an overall sense of recognition as I read it, but I do think the story stands admirably well on its own. The writing is beautiful, carrying a unique and distinctive voice while still honoring the tone and style of Poe’s original story. The worldbuilding is fantastic, providing a shot of immediate recognition from the very first page for anyone familiar with the source material, but still painting an intriguing and vivid picture for anyone who has not.

But above all, the thing I think holds this story together is the fact that it has…

The perfect characters for the job

There is nothing I love more than a character who knows what genre they’re in and openly resents it. I’m thinking of Easton and Miss Potter here in particular, but I think most of the characters display this phenomenon at some point. Easton is absolutely not cut out to be the protagonist of a horror novel, and that’s exactly what makes them the perfect protagonist for this one. Same goes for Miss Potter. Neither of these characters gives two hoots about danger, both are almost painfully scientific in their reasoning processes, and neither has even the faintest passing belief in the supernatural. And these are just the two most extreme examples. In one way or another, the entire cast of this story is primed from the beginning to discount the spooky things they’re seeing all around them and try to find a reasonable, scientific explanation, only to find that the reasonable, scientific explanation is even more terrifying. And I love that for them.

(Also, I love Hob. Yes, the horse. He is the best character in the story, and I will be taking no questions.)

One particularly wonderful thing these characters brought to the table was humor. All dark stories need some lightness in them, if only to make the darkness stand out. That’s one reason why story elements like comedy or romance pair so well with horror. And there were some truly fantastic moments of levity in this book. As a narrator, Easton is fun – just fun. Every observation, every interaction with the other characters, is packed with personality, tongue-in-cheek humor, and heart that truly brought this story to life.

Issues

My biggest complaint about What Moves the Dead could have been solved but cutting about fifty words from one of the final chapters. I’m going to do my best not to spoil things too badly here, but this issue raises such an important point about the nature of horror that I think it’s worth the risk to address.

I have always felt that a critical element of a horror story is having something that stretches beyond the bounds of the story, intruding on the reader’s life. It’s the and it could still be out there factor. Nobody really loses sleep over stories – we lose sleep over the parts of stories we can imagine coming true. And What Moves the Dead had an absolutely perfect execution of this set up, then threw it away right at the end.

Basically, a lot of the tension ends up deriving from the notion that because of where the house is likely getting its water supply, whatever’s happening to Madeline might be about to happen to everyone else, too. I loved this, and I still have visions of how wonderful it could have been if this had been left unresolved, implying that other victims are left roaming around in the world, perhaps masquerading amongst us still. We could have been left to wonder about the fate of the surviving characters without losing any of the resolution you get from the story’s ending.

But no – instead, we got a minor character (who, I am convinced, was only introduced by name for the purposes of delivering this little nugget of information) explaining that actually, the house’s water supply comes from a very nice well that has no haunted fungus in it whatsoever. And everyone just goes, “Oh, ok, great!” and moves on with their lives. It is anticlimactic in the extreme, and feels like an over-resolution of the plot: the result of a frantic instinct to tie things off without stopping to think about whether the tone of the story and the conventions of its genre demand it. (Spoilers: they didn’t.)

On the other hand, I am afraid of my own arm hair now, so I guess the goal was accomplished successfully enough in other areas to make up for it.

More broadly, though, I really felt like this story could have been so much bigger than it was. It’s a pretty short book with a fairly one-dimensional plot, which is a shame for a story with such rich worldbuilding and characters so packed with potential. There was so much room there to flesh it out with more subplots, or bring back fun details that were introduced early on and sadly got left by the wayside.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book – I did, tremendously! The problem is that I know I could have enjoyed it more.

The final verdict

I’m going to give What Moves the Dead 3.5/5 undead hares. T. Kingfisher is an incredibly talented author, and I will definitely be reading more of her work in the future. Despite the book’s problems with committing to certain elements of the story, it was such a fun read, and I’d happily recommend it to any Poe fan looking for a fresh take on one of his classics – or anyone else, frankly. And its biggest issue is really quite a lovely problem for a book to have: I wish so hard that there was more of it.

Happy reading!