Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > What Moves the Dead

Wow. This started off reading like a fairly straightforward novelization of The Fall of the House of Usher and then veered off in a direction I TOTALLY was not expecting. It's certainly more of an explanation than Poe gave in his original story, hah.

There are some other interesting differences here: more characters, including a non-binary narrator with an intriguing background and unusual personal pronouns (which pronouns actually comes into play in a surprising way much later in the story), a mushroom scholar and artist who appears to be Beatrix Potter's maiden aunt, and the narrator's horse who has personality to spare. Madeleine Usher is a more fully developed character, which is all to the good. And there's a tarn around the Usher mansion with odd lights in the water ...

Excellently creepy.

Full RTC! Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.