WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, mycological nightmare fodder

WHAT MOVES THE DEAD
T. KINGFISHER
Nightfire Books
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five
WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL!


The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric 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.

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My Review: I've marked this as a story with "transgender representation," and although that is a way of seeing Alex Easton I don't know of it's one ka would approve of. I could simply be another American man committing a dreadful solecism in kan opinion. Oh well.

Now. On to the bad, awful, hideous, nightmarish stuff.

You've most likely read "The Fall of the House of Usher" at some point in your school career/teenaged glooms. (Not-Americans even know about this story, and I understand it's popular among Poe's French-speaking admirers.) So did T. Kingfisher, and did she have questions after reading it! Wowee toledo.

Alex Easton, our narrator-cum-PoV person, has a strangely English name and a uniquely different cultural outlook. Ka was born female and swore into the life of a soldier, an ungendered occupation among kan fellow countrymen. I suspect it wasn't uncommon for warrior societies to have permeable gender boundaries given that not all man-plumbed persons are suited to soldiering and not all woman-plumbed persons are suitable to motherhood. Those being the basic occupations of the sexes for much of human history, it would surprise me greatly if most didn't have some kind or sort of accommodation to this reality. I believe the warrior graves with female bodies in them discovered all over Europe and Asia are an indicator of this.

Easton, as ka is known to the Usher siblings ka knew in distant childhood and youth, has at last emerged from soldiering...one senses unwillingly...now that peace has returned. A letter from kan friend Madeline Usher brings ka at the trot: "Roderick thinks I am dying." For one thing, bonds that old...and ka was Roderick's commander during the war, to boot...can't be gainsaid. Off ka, and kan batman Angus, and kan horse Hob (all well-sketched characters of great sensitivity in their portrayal) trot to the Ushers' ancestral home in neighboring Ruravia (!) to Do What Needs Doing.

Thus the nightmare begins. Ka finds Roderick a wisp, Madeline a cold shell of her former lovely self, and Roderick's American friend Denton...whose soldiering was done in the Civil War, in a medical tent. Despite kan poor opinion of Americans, this earns him a degree of latitude for being gauche and unfamiliar with how to treat sworn soldiers like ka. (That little pronoun, in kan Gallacian language, is used for both sexes of sworn soldiers. Tidily solves the vexed problem of gendered soldiery.) Alex finds Denton, and the English language, adequate but frustratingly unsophisticated, leading to kan delightful outburst, "Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things."

I relate, my soul sibling Alex. I so so relate.

I don't think it helps anything to recapitulate "The Fall of the House of Usher." I am aware that some people haven't read it, though honestly I find that easier to conceptualize than to understand. Let's just say that the mycohorror subgenre that's come into being and has fetidly overgrown the various horror and adjacent literary fields...Annihilation and its siblings, The Girl with All the Gifts, on and on...have been gazumped (from German gesumpf, tossed into a swamp) by T. Kingfisher's lighter, brighter touch and inimitable ability to slosh humor over a rankly rotting, unnaturally ambulating, little-white-hyphae-shedding Object of Horror, and not have the results resemble a desecrated grave.

I loved the read. I think most people I know would at the very least like it. And, fellow old-enough-to-remember souls, I think Denton the American is a call-out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can't prove it...the author doesn't mention it in her self-deprecating endnotes...but I found myself humming "Denton, Denton/you've got no pretensions" every time he hove into view.

...wait...what are those little white...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH, Cassandra Khaw's eerie group-ghostie tale

NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH
CASSANDRA KHAW
Nightfire Books
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Nominated for the BEST NOVEL AWARD—2021 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS! Winner annunced on 29 October 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a gorgeously creepy haunted house tale, steeped in Japanese folklore and full of devastating twists.

A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.

It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.

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My Review: No one gets do-overs in life. The one thing Horror teaches us, firmly and finally, is that single adamantine truth...that final, fierce fact that trumps them all.

When privileged and pretty people want to play, they go mad. They have no reason to consider consequences and no desire to moderate their demands on the Universe's supply of goodwill. There's nothing to say that a destination/theme wedding, a haunted-house horror wedding for five, couldn't be just lovely.

Except, of course, common sense.

As the events of the day unfold, as the people whose lives were compressed into a block of being by the exigencies of education and privilege come unstuck, their masks reveal the real cracks in their faces. Then the masks fall off. Then the faces fall off. This is a horror novella about the awfulness of unslakable appetites, and the enduring pain of never, ever having Enough. Being enough. Finding enough.

Author Khaw has used the silences of screaming people to make this dread-soaked, foregone-conclusion-led, story into a fable for our use. You can find anything in it. You're going to try, so don't bother to front. Looking for a climate-change metaphor? The ancient house with the dead people in its walls. Looking for a religious metaphor? The Forces of Evil animating one of the young people to perform uncharacteristic acts. Revenge fantasy? Dude!

Slasher fans: You have a new talent to follow. Author Khaw understands why we love to see the world end in a welter of blood. Go down the dark alley leading up to the ancient haunted mansion with the moldy old books falling apart in its library.

Go on. You know you want to.

SLEWFOOT, Brom's latest tale of unease and injustice

SLEWFOOT: A Tale of Bewitchery
BROM
Nightfire Books
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A spirited young Englishwoman, Abitha, arrives at a Puritan colony betrothed to a stranger – only to become quickly widowed when her husband dies under mysterious circumstances. All alone in this pious and patriarchal society, Abitha fights for what little freedom she can grasp onto, while trying to stay true to herself and her past.

Enter Slewfoot, a powerful spirit of antiquity newly woken… and trying to find his own role in the world. Healer or destroyer? Protector or predator? But as the shadows walk and villagers start dying, a new rumor is whispered: Witch.

Both Abitha and Slewfoot must swiftly decide who they are, and what they must do to survive in a world intent on hanging any who meddle in the dark arts.

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My Review: Maybe it was the teen angst. Maybe it was my allergy to Villains Without Nuance. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I don't like this book much. I should...spooky dos in Puritan times? folk horror? Revenge?! yes please...and I think I might have if I hadn't taken against Abitha so very strongly. Adolescents whose sense of themselves as Right and Hard Done By aren't enjoyable companions for an entire book. I felt Abitha's difficulties with Authority were period appropriate...totally bought that she was justifiably angry with the entire male world...but she comes across as a modern woman. Then when Slewfoot-the-character wins her over with no effort? He's an innocent, albeit one with tremendous Powers, and with...um...horns? Literal goatly horns. But Abitha just...accepts. It strained me to buy into that.

I'm not insensitive to the appeal of the Other to those trapped in rigid, conformity-enforcing social milieus. But Abitha's ready acceptance of this, um, extremely Other that resembles the goat we meet her losing...and she even calls him "Samson" after the goat...it didn't scan for me with a seventeenth-century woman. Not even one whose upbringing was as peculiar, her mother a root woman and her father a drunken sot, as hers was.

My most favoritest thing is the animate Forest that Slewfoot (he has other names throughout the story, all of which carry their own shades of meaning and of humor) cohabits with, that has re-summoned Slewfoot from a liminal state to deal with Forest's concerns about its future. (I loved Jesus Thunderbird's name for Slewfoot...Hobomok...as it carried so many levels, from a beautiful butterfly to a scary demon via an early American novel about the Noble Savage slur. A quick trip to the internet will give you literal *hours* of perusing pleasure.) Perhaps the most unsettling of Brom's illustrations is the one he made for Creek:

It's perfect, it's unsettlingly Other, and completely relatably familiar all at the same time. What's missing here is the essence of Creek's Wrongness, Otherness...scale...Creek is tiny and looks like that. Sweet dreams!

These being hallmarks of Brom's works, and the source of my relatively high rating for a book I wasn't all the way in sympathy with, so I was rolling along fine until...the torture porn began. Abitha and her mother, women accused of witchcraft, were in for a bad time. I accepted that. But I was revolted by the deeply prurient recounting of the torments meted out to the women, guilty as charged by the lights of the community they lived in though ambiguously so in modern eyes. They transgressed...they paid dearly for it...

"I want to burn them to the ground, All of them. All of it. Their church, their commandments, their covenants, their riles, edicts, and laws, their fields, their homes, and most of all their fucking bonnets and aprons. I want to hollow them out, make them know what it is to lose everything, everything, to lose their very soul!"

Nothing in this life comes for free...the bigger the ask, the bigger the price. There is more truth than you can fully know in the ancient adage, "Be careful what you wish for lest the answer be Yes."