What Moves the Dead

As an amateur mycologist who has been actively involved in community building and engagement around environmental justice and mycology, I must ask, does this book promote mycophobia or mycophillia? I have never read a T. Kingfisher book, but picked this up because I heard it had mushrooms.

I was excited when this book started off featuring a character named Eugenia Potter, implied to the fictional aunt of real mycologist and author of the Peter Rabbit children's books: Beatrix Potter. There are many aspects to real mycological concerns around things like species identification. There's also references to the important discussion of sexism within mycology.

I also do appreciate that the main character Alex (they/them in English, Ka/Kan in native fictional heritage) is one that would not typically get attention as a retired female soldier. When it comes to gender and pronouns, I am torn.

Alex is from a fictional country where soldiers gain specific pronouns which translate to a gender neutral term like they/them. In fictional history, soldiers were socially defined as male, but due to an accident a woman was able to become a soldier since there wasn't exactly paperwork with gender exclusive language being equivocated to cis men using he/him, and due to the deficiency in people to conscript, it set a precedent for more women to come. So new rights for women, closer to the rights of men, because of: war.

Pronouns are not the same as gender, period. This carries over as Alex still acknowledges themselves as a woman using occupation-based gender-neutral neopronoun variant of a formerly occupation based cis man's pronoun. I like the idea that the gender associated with pronouns can change. Yet, women are still treated has weaker to men that need to be protected (unless I suppose, they become a soldier).

Alex is often treated in a manner that equivocates soldier status not to a gender neutrality, but to overt manhood through activities and roles that are otherwise mean to exclude non-soldier women (this soldier, that is a "man", cannot be left alone with an unmarried woman), though occasionally dismissed as a woman to be patronized (is this woman really a soldier?), or maybe neither mostly out of a confusion and giving up: not overt acceptance of gender neutral presentation.

Kingfisher's use of gender-neutral pronouns does not appear to me to be an act of defining non-binary gender (as gender is not the same as pronouns), which is fine, but the fact that ultimately binary gender roles are enforced and gender-neutral presentation is still held to it is disappointing. As a transmasc person constantly having my masculinity be put into question or treated as if joining the boy's club means playing into misogynistic gender roles, I don't love Alex being treated as some kind of man-"lite".

Looking into it, there are real historical examples that this seems to be inspired by: known as the Sworn Virgins of Albania. I don't know enough about it though to say what it has to do with pronouns, especially considering Alex is from a fictional country that could have had any history written, Alex is not said to be from Albania!

Ultimately, this is a horror book that, despite Eugenia's love for mushrooms, sets a completely fictional and unfounded fear for mushrooms in our main character. Okay, we have plenty of scary mushroom stories, I'm not going to ban them. My concern is that, to write such a story with an overwhelmingly white, militant, and questionable gender representation, it is not for a person like me nor would I feel comfortable sharing it to promote an interest in mushrooms.

Thank god, it was a very short listen.

It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others. Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare. My nerve broke and I ran.

First off, this isn't the sort of story you should read when your neighborhood is bunny central, no more morning tea saying softly good morning to them anymore.

Inspired by Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Alex is back from the war and going to their friend's house in the country to check on childhood friends. They received a letter from Roderick claiming that his sister Madeline has fallen ill. When they get there, they meet Miss Potter in the country side studying mushrooms, as the area has a multitude of varieties, and a severally ill Madeline, not looking to great himself Roderick, and an American doctor. Alex likes to take the piss out of the doctor in their thoughts: I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them. and Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American. So there's some touches of humor in the first half until things start to deteriorate.

“I hear things now,” he said. “Everything. My own heartbeat. Other people’s breathing sounds like thunder. Sometimes I fancy I can hear the worms in the rafters.”

I have to say that I know the author is setting the scene and working to build the suspense but I still thought the first half read fairly slow and it was hard to put myself in the late 1800s mindset of not really knowing what was going on when the mushroom, fungi, and the like is dripping down the walls. I also thought it was a little too convenient that Miss Potter was in the neighborhood, an expert in the field to explain everything; unluckiest luckiest people in this house. This is a little shorter page count, 150ish pages, so while you're introduced to the characters and get some of their personality, Alex, who is telling the story all from their pov, is the only one you really get to know. At the halfway point, when things go south for Madeline, is where I thought the story really picked up.

“What if I told you those were growing out of human skin?”

The second half had some great horror visuals, bunnies with heads half blown off getting up, crawling around, and eyeballing people, and other scenes did give me the creeps and will linger in my mind. I was thinking a two or three star rating and the second half bumped it up to four stars to almost 5. We do get an explanation as to what was going on, a horror taking care of business scene, and then an ending that does and doesn't quite sit well with you that everything will be all right now. If you've been missing episodes of The Last of Us, this would be a great quick story to tied you over.

Oh my gosh, I was really really enjoying this book up until maybe the last three chapters. Incredible how it pivoted so hard. I couldn't help but compare this to Mexican Gothic, a book I was a fan of. But this improved on that story in so many ways. The creepiness factor was really dialed up, and I found myself to be legitimately freaked out at times. I loved the body horror and almost alien, incomprehensible horror that they were trying to uncover. However all of that went downhill when Madeline, quite predictably, arose from the dead, being controlled by the fungus. That in and of itself wasn't an issue. I thought that was creepy. But having possessed a human, it gave voice to the fungus, which was apparently semi-conscious, had motivations, and was like a child wanting to learn more. There was a comically bad scene of Madeline moaning like a zombie, pleading with the main character to help the fungus learn and grow. It instantly dashed the scariest part of the book, which was that this was a horrific, inescapable thing that happens because fungus doesn't have motivations, and it is a horrific thought that something without motivation can do such terrible things to living beings for seemingly no other reason than to propagate. A hard truth in nature. But making the fungus sentient just ruined it for me, honestly. I want to give the book credit for how gripped it was the majority of the time, but boy was this a disappointing ending.

Merged review:

Oh my gosh, I was really really enjoying this book up until maybe the last three chapters. Incredible how it pivoted so hard. I couldn't help but compare this to Mexican Gothic, a book I was a fan of. But this improved on that story in so many ways. The creepiness factor was really dialed up, and I found myself to be legitimately freaked out at times. I loved the body horror and almost alien, incomprehensible horror that they were trying to uncover. However all of that went downhill when Madeline, quite predictably, arose from the dead, being controlled by the fungus. That in and of itself wasn't an issue. I thought that was creepy. But having possessed a human, it gave voice to the fungus, which was apparently semi-conscious, had motivations, and was like a child wanting to learn more. There was a comically bad scene of Madeline moaning like a zombie, pleading with the main character to help the fungus learn and grow. It instantly dashed the scariest part of the book, which was that this was a horrific, inescapable thing that happens because fungus doesn't have motivations, and it is a horrific thought that something without motivation can do such terrible things to living beings for seemingly no other reason than to propagate. A hard truth in nature. But making the fungus sentient just ruined it for me, honestly. I want to give the book credit for how gripped it was the majority of the time, but boy was this a disappointing ending.