After the nightmare-inducing occurrence at the Usher manor, Alex Easton just wants some rest, relaxation, and calm days, but instead, as a favor to their valet Angus and the mycologist Miss Potter, they find themself heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp, forbidding forests of their home country, Gallacia. Once there, they discover the gamekeeper dead, the villagers closed in and suspicious, with whispers of a strange breath-stealing spirit entering people’s dreams. Alex doesn’t believe it for an instant; but then again, their dreams have been rather strange of late….
And I thought the first novella was creepy. T. Kingfisher is a master of disquieting atmospheric horror, the kind that creeps up on you slowly, and seems just this side of unbelievable. Her characters are well written and seem real; they have aches and pains, and act like you would expect normal people to in the situations they find themselves in. Another fact I liked is that the three of them are all over the age of 30, so you don’t get your usual fresh-faced idealistic youths wandering around dealing with all of this. You get the feeling that this is just the latest in a long line of crap that has been dumped on their shoulders, and they’ll deal with it like they’ve dealt with everything else, and take the PTSD that comes along with the horrors.
Kingfisher taking Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and making it even more gothic and horror was a stroke of genius in the first book (What Moves the Dead), and while I don’t know if I agree that this is still a continuation of the House of Usher, I will say that it does keep up to the quality of the first book. I will be picking up the third as soon as it gets published.