Hardcover, 176 pages
Published March 26, 2024 by Tor Nightfire.
The follow-up to T. Kingfisher’s bestselling gothic novella, What Moves the Dead .
Retired soldier Alex Easton returns in a horrifying new adventure.
After their terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themself heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia.
In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that a breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell that something …
The follow-up to T. Kingfisher’s bestselling gothic novella, What Moves the Dead .
Retired soldier Alex Easton returns in a horrifying new adventure.
After their terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themself heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia.
In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that a breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell that something is not quite right in their home. . . or in their dreams.
It was even less relevant to me than the first book without the mushrooms or ecological basis. Spooky things keep happening inexplicably to a person that is brave but did not want to be doing all this can someone please give them a break.
I was hesitant to pick this one up initially because so many sequels for books that could easily have been a one-off tend to try too hard and just lose focus. I'm definitely glad that I decided to give it a go finally, because I was quite surprised by it.
The horror aspects of this book were not quite as heavy as the first, but I didn't mind at all due to the fact that you really got to know more about Easton and their PTSD issues from the war. Easton has such great banter and it adds a perfect layer of light humor to the undertones of the book.
I'll definitely be reading the third one when it gets released and would recommend this to anyone that enjoyed the first.
Content warning Spoilers inbound
Okay I'll be blunt: I wanted What Feasts At Night to be the moths. Last book was fungi, next moths. But it was an annoyingly tantalizing theme dangled just out of reach for the entire book. dWe got one scene where a living but partially consumed horse collapses into moths, and it was the best scene of the book. I honestly don't even get the theme of moths and I don't think it was explained. If it was just some kind of misdirect then barf. "It was ghost" was disappointing, but still enjoyable. Haunting books are okay but I was hoping for something special like What Moves the Dead, but I got a pretty enjoyable but generic haunting tale. "It was a dream" is the bit I am vigorously forcing out of my memory because the book up until the point was doing just fine. Forgetting it is doing the story a courtesy.
I really hope the next one is more like What Moves the Dead in the respects I gave here.
Obviously as the Perfect Person and not just some guy, my opinion matters greatly. Thanks for reading.
Alex Easton is such a great character and I was very happy getting to read more about them. This book is a little less creepy and a lot more Easton than its predecessor.
I didn't get into the main story much, and the nightmare-ish qualities weren't what I was feeling like. But I loved the casual countryside living talk, and the ways the characters interacted.
This book is a sequel to What Moves the Dead. It was a little unexpected (to me at least!) that there'd be a sequel to something that was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher--where do you even go from there? Apparently, another mystery! This time it follows the same set of characters (Easton, Angus, and Eugenia Potter), but instead is set at Easton's childhood lodge in Gallacia.
What I liked about this book was the way it much more tightly wove together parallels of Easton's war-related PTSD and the horror of dreams. While What Moves the Dead felt more like several unrelated stories grafted together, this was a more cohesive novella.
(If I had any petty wishes, it would be to give Eugenia Potter more of a role here. She gets some good quotes, but is ultimately a background character that almost didn't need to …
This book is a sequel to What Moves the Dead. It was a little unexpected (to me at least!) that there'd be a sequel to something that was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher--where do you even go from there? Apparently, another mystery! This time it follows the same set of characters (Easton, Angus, and Eugenia Potter), but instead is set at Easton's childhood lodge in Gallacia.
What I liked about this book was the way it much more tightly wove together parallels of Easton's war-related PTSD and the horror of dreams. While What Moves the Dead felt more like several unrelated stories grafted together, this was a more cohesive novella.
(If I had any petty wishes, it would be to give Eugenia Potter more of a role here. She gets some good quotes, but is ultimately a background character that almost didn't need to be there. I also wish there had been a little bit more worldbuilding about Gallacia. Even for being set there, it felt like there was little elaboration on the fictional country past what we had already learned.)
