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What Moves the Dead

Pages
176
Published
2022
Language
English

Synopsis

Retired soldier Alex Easton travels to the crumbling Usher estate in the remote countryside of Ruravia after a letter warns that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying. What Alex finds is worse than illness: a black tarn that shouldn't ripple the way it does, hares that move all wrong, and a house furred with strange fungus, where Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in a voice not her own while her brother Roderick unravels.

With the help of a plainspoken American doctor and an English mycologist fascinated by the estate's impossible fungi, Easton tries to understand what is happening to the Ushers before it claims them all.

T. Kingfisher's atmospheric gothic novella reimagines Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a creeping, fungal body-horror, sharp and eerie and laced with dry wit.

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About the author

T
T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon, an author from North Carolina. In another life, she writes children's books and weird comics. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy and the Eisner, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, Nebula, Alfie, WSFA, Coyotl and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-dozen Junior Library Guild selections. This is the name she uses when writing things for grown-ups. Her work includes multiple fairy-tale retellings and odd little stories about...

Characters

Alex EastonProtagonist

A retired soldier investigating the strange illness afflicting their childhood friend Madeline Usher.

Lady Madeline UsherSupporting

Easton's dying childhood friend, behaving increasingly strangely.

Roderick UsherSupporting

Madeline's brother, afflicted by a nervous illness.

Eugenia PotterSupporting

An English mycologist fascinated by the estate's fungi.

Dr. James DentonSupporting

An American army doctor staying at the estate to attend Madeline; his experience is mostly battlefield surgery rather than diagnosis.

All characters in What Moves the Dead

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