Yes, it's a retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Yes, the premise is fairly well telegraphed the moment we meet Eugenia Potter, amateur mycologist (and — naturally — a relation of Beatrix). None of that stopped me from finishing this 150-page novella completely won over. I'll be damned if I can find a reason not to give it five stars.
The real triumph here is Alex Easton's first-person narration. Instead of leaning on atmosphere alone to do the work — the easy move for a haunted-house retelling — Kingfisher gives us a narrator with a distinct interior life: what Easton values, how they think, how they feel. It never tips into info-dumping, the prose is complex and nuanced without slowing the story down, and there are genuinely funny bits woven through the dread, which keeps the book from ever feeling like a pure mood exercise.
Easton's invented home country of Gallacia is a great example of worldbuilding done right — it's stitched skillfully into real European geography and history rather than floating free as a vague fantasy backdrop. One of my favorite small touches is the distinction Angus and the villagers draw between "canny" and "not canny." It's a tiny bit of invented cultural vocabulary that does a lot of heavy lifting, letting the book talk around the horror before it's ready to name it directly.
Compared to books it clearly sits alongside — Mexican Gothic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers — what sets this apart is how much empathy Kingfisher builds for her core cast: Easton, Denton, Potter, and Angus. I found myself genuinely invested in their outcomes, which isn't a given in this kind of "creeping wrongness" story, where the reader often figures things out well before the characters do. (Roderick and Madeline, unsurprisingly, get considerably less of that sympathy — as Poe fans would expect.)
I also can't stop thinking about how efficiently this book does everything it sets out to do. It's maybe 150 pages, and in that space it builds a fully realized main character, a functioning invented culture, a mystery, real dread, and real humor — with nothing that feels like padding. Which raises a question I keep coming back to: why can't YA do this? So much YA now comes in these 600-plus-page doorstoppers full of repetition and recontextualization, like the book doesn't trust the reader to have retained anything from fifty pages ago. There's nothing in What Moves the Dead that's explicitly "adult" — no content a teen reader couldn't handle — and I think it would genuinely appeal to kids who like goth and horror. The queerness in it works in a way that feels completely natural, not like an Issue being addressed, just part of who Easton is. It's a good reminder that "for teens" doesn't have to mean bloated, over-explained, or afraid to trust its reader.
The audiobook version was also quite engaging. I listened at 2x — it's a bit slow at normal speed — and kudos to the narrator for still sounding good at the faster pace.
A short book that does an enormous amount with its page count. Highly recommended, especially if you're a Poe fan or you liked Mexican Gothic. Looking forward to the next two books in the series, and then on to the Ana and Din duology.
POSTSCRIPT: This is the second “retelling” of a well known story that I have completed this summer in my Hugos quest. I also read Cinder House by Freya Marske, another Hugo nominee, this one a retelling of Cinderella — also short, and also a genuinely fun, relatable, enjoyable spin on a story everyone already thinks they know. Between the two of them, I'm impressed by how much these authors have managed to take classic stories and folk material and turn them into something that feels different, but is still just as engaging and fun as the source material. It's a nice reminder that a retelling doesn't need extra length to earn its place — it needs a clear point of view on the original.
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