On What Moves the Dead

A note: this gives away key plot points and endings.

I picked up What Moves the Dead because I wanted to join a local book club and this was their next read. T. Kingfisher is a popular author, but I’d never read her before. Wow — I was impressed. The premise is simple: how might we expand, or re-read, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”? I’d always read Poe’s story through the lens of a newfound American identity, with the House of Usher standing for European states and systems — a way for Poe to needle the European aristocracies and say that, illustrious past or not, their days are numbered and there’s no way forward for them; both Roderick and Madeline are destined to die along with their house, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Kingfisher does something quite different. As in Poe, Madeline is on the verge of death and Roderick suffers from an “illness of the nerves,” but instead of a harrowing gothic tale about social systems, Kingfisher gives us a story about possession. Possession stories always fascinate me — they’re a way of talking about human agency in a wondrous, awe-some, or grotesque register — and here, rather than ghosts or demons, Madeline is possessed by a fungus that grew in a tarn.

Kingfisher’s note to the reader at the end is eye-opening: she was fascinated by how often Poe mentions mushrooms, which is striking given how short the original story is, and she set out to combine his mushrooms with recent advances in mycology. Growing up, I thought of mushrooms as lifeforms like plants — they had a stem, and in my young mind they were something like miniature bushes or trees; I knew other fungi existed, mostly lichen and mold, but I’d never even considered that yeast was a fungus. Recent mycology points to fungi being wholly unlike plants and animals: they live in colonies, their cells are largely undifferentiated (no “brain” or “heart” or “skin” cells), many reproduce asexually from a single parent, the spores identical to it, and they communicate through chemical signals and come in many forms. If you limit your idea of life to animals, plants, and single cells, fungi look weird, alien — which makes them great material for cosmic horror. I wouldn’t quite call Kingfisher’s book cosmic horror, but it draws heavily on the Weird tradition (so often symbolized by the tentacle; cephalopods seem alien to us too, even though they’re animals), and it forces us to the realization that reality is far stranger and more terrifying than we ever thought.

The world has enough flesh to be immersive despite the book’s brevity. Through well-placed exposition from the narrator, Alex Easton, and conversations with other characters, we learn a lot — but this isn’t world-building from scratch; learning about Gallacia and Ruravia is more like learning about actually-existing places through realistic novels or journalism. It’s as if I read a travel editorial by a Bulgarian author: they might complain about a few things, but it isn’t much more than ordinary griping, and I might find it odd that the writer mentions how the rabbits walk funny, but my eyes would keep drifting across the page without a second thought. It’s interesting in terms of genre, too — I saw it marketed as “dark fantasy,” but it’s much better described as weird horror. There were moments in the last act, reading late at night, when I felt genuinely frightened, and the fear came less from the events than from the vibe: wispy hyphae, breathy hollow laughter, jagged locomotion, a wholly “xeno” image. My trouble with novels like this is that, instead of taking for granted that they’re fiction, I really do wonder, what if the world were like that? what if this were true? Call it an overactive imagination, but that’s how I read, and read this way the novel offers a horrifying view of reality. What else might we not know?

The story is structured as a classic mystery, dropping clues for us to piece together, and I figured it out fairly early, around page 90, when Easton goes hunting for a hare; there’s enough here that a reader will feel proud to have solved it, but it could have used more misdirection, since if you paid attention it was all quite clear. What really impressed me was Kingfisher’s attention to detail. The clues are tied back into the mystery beautifully — when Madeline’s “other” sleepwalks, it has trouble pronouncing certain sounds, and we learn at the end that the fungus had to learn to talk, since fungi don’t communicate the way humans do. Madeline’s dialogue:

“One,” she said. “Two … thhhhreee … ‘our … ‘ive … sixsss …” She paused as if thinking. “Se’en … eight … nnnine … te-uhn.” She looked at me. “Goooood?”

Earlier she’d had trouble with “M” sounds, so the fungus can’t pronounce “F,” “V,” or “M” — all labial consonants, in fact all the labial consonants that would have appeared in alter-Madeline’s sentences. Kingfisher’s choice of which sounds the fungus finds difficult is highly logical; there’s nothing random about it, and I’m not sure I could have pulled that off myself. Detail like that is what makes What Moves the Dead so alive. The ending was satisfying, though I had mixed feelings about finishing, simply because I wanted to spend more time in the constructions of her imagination. It’s an excellent introduction to her work, and you can be sure I’ll be reading more of her.