What Moves the Dead

As an amateur mycologist who has been actively involved in community building and engagement around environmental justice and mycology, I must ask, does this book promote mycophobia or mycophillia? I have never read a T. Kingfisher book, but picked this up because I heard it had mushrooms.

I was excited when this book started off featuring a character named Eugenia Potter, implied to the fictional aunt of real mycologist and author of the Peter Rabbit children's books: Beatrix Potter. There are many aspects to real mycological concerns around things like species identification. There's also references to the important discussion of sexism within mycology.

I also do appreciate that the main character Alex (they/them in English, Ka/Kan in native fictional heritage) is one that would not typically get attention as a retired female soldier. When it comes to gender and pronouns, I am torn.

Alex is from a fictional country where soldiers gain specific pronouns which translate to a gender neutral term like they/them. In fictional history, soldiers were socially defined as male, but due to an accident a woman was able to become a soldier since there wasn't exactly paperwork with gender exclusive language being equivocated to cis men using he/him, and due to the deficiency in people to conscript, it set a precedent for more women to come. So new rights for women, closer to the rights of men, because of: war.

Pronouns are not the same as gender, period. This carries over as Alex still acknowledges themselves as a woman using occupation-based gender-neutral neopronoun variant of a formerly occupation based cis man's pronoun. I like the idea that the gender associated with pronouns can change. Yet, women are still treated has weaker to men that need to be protected (unless I suppose, they become a soldier).

Alex is often treated in a manner that equivocates soldier status not to a gender neutrality, but to overt manhood through activities and roles that are otherwise mean to exclude non-soldier women (this soldier, that is a "man", cannot be left alone with an unmarried woman), though occasionally dismissed as a woman to be patronized (is this woman really a soldier?), or maybe neither mostly out of a confusion and giving up: not overt acceptance of gender neutral presentation.

Kingfisher's use of gender-neutral pronouns does not appear to me to be an act of defining non-binary gender (as gender is not the same as pronouns), which is fine, but the fact that ultimately binary gender roles are enforced and gender-neutral presentation is still held to it is disappointing. As a transmasc person constantly having my masculinity be put into question or treated as if joining the boy's club means playing into misogynistic gender roles, I don't love Alex being treated as some kind of man-"lite".

Looking into it, there are real historical examples that this seems to be inspired by: known as the Sworn Virgins of Albania. I don't know enough about it though to say what it has to do with pronouns, especially considering Alex is from a fictional country that could have had any history written, Alex is not said to be from Albania!

Ultimately, this is a horror book that, despite Eugenia's love for mushrooms, sets a completely fictional and unfounded fear for mushrooms in our main character. Okay, we have plenty of scary mushroom stories, I'm not going to ban them. My concern is that, to write such a story with an overwhelmingly white, militant, and questionable gender representation, it is not for a person like me nor would I feel comfortable sharing it to promote an interest in mushrooms.

Thank god, it was a very short listen.

This is a novella based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. In the 1890s; Easton, a former soldier of the Gallacia, visits kan old friend Madeline Usher at her family’s ancestral seat on the news that she may be dying. The house is decaying and covered in fungus; only a few servants remain (Madeline’s maid jumped from the roof a few months prior) while her nervous wreck of a brother has only an American doctor to rely on who is baffled by Madeline’s ailment. As Easton attempts to help the family, ka uncovers a mystery around the glowing lake and unsettling wildlife that just won't die.

If you’re up for some gothic horror, mycelial zombie hares, a soldier whose gender/pronouns are simply “soldier”, and regular English jibes at Americans then this is worth picking up. I enjoyed the characters a lot, especially Easton and the English lady providing the mushroom nerdery, and I’m always here for fungal horror vibes. It gives it a blend of old and modern horror. 

Oh my gosh, I was really really enjoying this book up until maybe the last three chapters. Incredible how it pivoted so hard. I couldn't help but compare this to Mexican Gothic, a book I was a fan of. But this improved on that story in so many ways. The creepiness factor was really dialed up, and I found myself to be legitimately freaked out at times. I loved the body horror and almost alien, incomprehensible horror that they were trying to uncover. However all of that went downhill when Madeline, quite predictably, arose from the dead, being controlled by the fungus. That in and of itself wasn't an issue. I thought that was creepy. But having possessed a human, it gave voice to the fungus, which was apparently semi-conscious, had motivations, and was like a child wanting to learn more. There was a comically bad scene of Madeline moaning like a zombie, pleading with the main character to help the fungus learn and grow. It instantly dashed the scariest part of the book, which was that this was a horrific, inescapable thing that happens because fungus doesn't have motivations, and it is a horrific thought that something without motivation can do such terrible things to living beings for seemingly no other reason than to propagate. A hard truth in nature. But making the fungus sentient just ruined it for me, honestly. I want to give the book credit for how gripped it was the majority of the time, but boy was this a disappointing ending.

Merged review:

Oh my gosh, I was really really enjoying this book up until maybe the last three chapters. Incredible how it pivoted so hard. I couldn't help but compare this to Mexican Gothic, a book I was a fan of. But this improved on that story in so many ways. The creepiness factor was really dialed up, and I found myself to be legitimately freaked out at times. I loved the body horror and almost alien, incomprehensible horror that they were trying to uncover. However all of that went downhill when Madeline, quite predictably, arose from the dead, being controlled by the fungus. That in and of itself wasn't an issue. I thought that was creepy. But having possessed a human, it gave voice to the fungus, which was apparently semi-conscious, had motivations, and was like a child wanting to learn more. There was a comically bad scene of Madeline moaning like a zombie, pleading with the main character to help the fungus learn and grow. It instantly dashed the scariest part of the book, which was that this was a horrific, inescapable thing that happens because fungus doesn't have motivations, and it is a horrific thought that something without motivation can do such terrible things to living beings for seemingly no other reason than to propagate. A hard truth in nature. But making the fungus sentient just ruined it for me, honestly. I want to give the book credit for how gripped it was the majority of the time, but boy was this a disappointing ending.

I'm sure I read The Fall of the House of Usher at some point, but I didn't retain enough that I had any particular expectations for the direction of the plot, etc.

However, I did read Mexican Gothic relatively recently, so I spent a good deal of What Moves the Dead, once the overall shape of the story became apparent, nodding along and waiting for the characters to catch up - it gave me a chuckle to see the reference to Mexican Gothic in the author's note.

Great writing, an intriguing reimagination of the classic.

I found The Fall Of The House Of Usher intriguing but ultimately frustrating, and judging by the author's note at the end of this book, so did Ursula Vernon. Her reworking does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the original while filling it out to be much more of a satisfying story, with clearer reasons behind what happens and much more compelling characters.

I love how the narrator has so much of their own story, and it's mostly made relevant to the core story of the book. And the mystery aspect is very well done, with that tantalising sense that we as readers are just slightly ahead of Easton & Denton in figuring out what's going on and what will have to happen. I also appreciated how Roderick gets to be more of an actor in this telling rather than a pure victim, and I'm intrigued by the ambiguity of whether Madeline also is one or whether we're purely hearing from the fungus towards the end of the book. It must be tempting when writing a story that fills in so many gaps from the original to fill in every gap, and I think stopping short of doing that was a very good move.

Creepier version of Edgar Allan Poe's story of The Fall of the House of Usher.