Man You Should’ve Seen Them Kicking Edgar Allan Poe

T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

Lieutenant Alex Easton (ret.) has come to call upon a fellow veteran, Roderick Usher, and his ailing sister, Madeline. No, seriously. Easton finds a rural manor house plagued with decay and verging on collapse, and a childhood friend reduced to a wisp straddling death’s door. Far worse, though, is what Easton discovers when he finds Madeline sleepwalking the labyrinthine halls: another voice speaks a malign message from Madeline’s lips.

T. Kingfisher is somewhat circumscribed by her source material, a retelling of one of Poe’s most famous stories. Either Kingfisher’s story plays to an inevitable end, or it abandons its source material, a perilous dilemma. And unfortunately, Christina Mrozik’s cover art spoils the climactic reveal. Rather than the resolution, we read Kingfisher’s novella for the suspense and exposition along the way, which Kingfisher has in abundance.

Besides Roderick and Madeline Usher, the named characters of Poe’s original short story, and Easton, Poe’s originally nameless narrator, we have two other characters: James Denton and Eugenia Potter. (All characters, except the Ushers, go by surnames, as befits the 19^th-Century setting.) In Poe’s original, the Usher siblings represent proto-Jungian archetypes of a fractured soul. In Kingfisher’s telling, characters become representatives of post-Napoleonic malaise.

First, Easton. A veteran of an army with an excessive range of pronouns, Easton’s androgynous name matters: one’s only gender is “sworn soldier.” Placed against the intensely gendered Usher siblings, Easton remains neither fish nor fowl, a permanent outsider cursed to watch humanity’s struggles without benefiting. Gender, and its attendant social baggage, looms large herein, driving people together but preventing characters from ever truly understanding one another.

Potter is a scholar and scientist, denied credentials in her native England because of her sex. Denton, a combat surgeon, survived the American Civil War, but suffers combat trauma, which in that time is regarded as emasculating cowardice. Both characters have conventional binary gender, but in their own ways defy mandatory gender expectations. When the crisis comes, however, their nonconformity defines their heroic qualities in the story.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve identified themes here, but Kingfisher doesn’t simply propound a message. Rather, these characters’ unique manifestations empower them to fight a threat growing beneath the unspoken tensions of the Long Nineteenth Century. What appears to be decay permeating the Ushers’ manor house, is actually a symbiotic growth that threatens the tenuous social structure of the Belle Epoque and the last days of aristocracy.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Poe is one among several writers whose stories expanded the realm of possibility in American literature. But, like Lovecraft, Poe’s writing reflects his time, and its prejudices. In recent years, authors like Victor LaValle and Kij Johnson have updated Lovecraft, rewriting his stories without the limiting biases. Though I know other authors have done likewise with Poe, I haven’t seen them the same way; Kingfisher closes that gap.

(Yes, Mike Flanagan released a House of Usher adaptation almost simultaneously with this novella. But I’m old-fashioned enough to distinguish between literature and streaming TV.)

Kingfisher’s story runs short—under 160 pages plus back matter—but never feels rushed. She nurtures the kind of character development and interpersonal relationships that Poe largely skimmed. Poe’s original, published in 1839, was groundbreaking, but its terse style feels underwritten by contemporary standards. Kingfisher injects the kind of depth and development that cause contemporary readers to feel suspense, and to care about the outcomes.

I especially respect that Kingfisher avoids that tedious contrivance of contemporary horror, the twist ending. For a quarter century, writers and filmmakers have insisted on finishing with a melodramatic rug-pull which undermines everything we thought we knew. This was fun for a while. But nobody’s likely to create a better twist than Catriona Ward, at least anytime soon. Kingfisher builds suspense on character and action, not by stacking the deck.

Rather than abrupt reversals, Kingfisher drives her story with questions that the characters must answer. Where, she asks, do monsters come from in an era which no longer believes in the supernatural? How can we fight monsters when they go beyond the limits of science and natural philosophy? And what does it mean to defeat an evil being that can get up and walk after you’ve already killed it?

Admittedly, Kingfisher is circumscribed because we know where her story is headed. We remember 11^th-grade AmLit. But she beats this limitation by interspersing a range of character development that would’ve frightened Edgar Allan Poe. Classic literature never just reflects itself, it asks important questions about us, the readers, and Kingfisher definitely achieves that goal.