What Feasts at Night

Hardcover, 176 pages

Published March 26, 2024 by Tor Nightfire.

ISBN:
978-1-250-83085-2
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4 stars (16 reviews)

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 …

2 editions

A surprisingly good sequel.

4 stars

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 to 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.

Real thoughts

3 stars

Content warning Spoilers inbound

What Feasts at Night

4 stars

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 …

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