T. Kingfisher

From the award-winning author of “The Twisted Ones” comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

What Moves the Dead

Nganh

The mushroom's gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here. Perhaps it would not have been so unsettling if the mush- rooms had not looked so much like flesh. The caps were clammy, swollen beige, puffed up against the dark-red gills.

Caroline Clutterbuck Kapulkin

the dead may walk, but i will not walk among them.

J Nieto

Mirto

The mushroom's gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera.

It is a cliche to say that a building's windows look like eyes because humans will find faces in anything and of course the windows would be the eyes. The house of Usher had dozens of eyes, so either it was a great many faces lined up together or it was the face of some creature belonging to a different order of life—a spider, perhaps, with rows of eyes along its head.

Granted, the plants all looked dead or dying. Granted, the windows of the house stared down like eye sockets in a row of skulls, yes, but so what? Actual rows of skulls wouldn't affect me so strongly. I knew a collector in Paris ... well, never mind the details. He was the gentlest of souls, though he did collect rather odd things. But he used to put festive hats on his skulls depending on the season, and they all looked rather jolly.

The war is the backdrop to most of my dreams. The house I grew up in, my grandmother's cottage, and the war, as if it was a place that I lived. I can't even say they're all nightmares. Sometimes it's just where the dream is happening.

"Is it?" He turned away. "I hear the woodworms gnawing in the beams," he muttered. "Would to God that they would gnaw a little faster."

Emiley Jones

The war had been hard on my feet and my knees and my faith in humanity. 

"Sorry, boy,” I said. "I’m not good company today."

Hob's ears were the equine equivalent of a shrug. Horses don't understand a lot about the world, but I have found that they sometimes understand particular humans terrifyingly well. Mules understand a lot more about the world, but less about humans—or possibly they just don't care what humans think. I’d buy either explanation, really.

Kingfisher infuses such an incredible sense of foreboding in her writing… And Easton is the perfect protagonist to investigate.

l have, as I have told you, reader, the psychic sensitivities of mud. It did not occur to me that I might be hallucinating, or that I might be seeing a ghost. Someone was walking through the halls at night and that someone must be real and alive.

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