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Title: What Moves the Dead
Author: T. Kingfisher
Genre: horror
[Posting a lil early as I'll be out of town, hope that's okay!]
I'd been wanting to read What Moves the Dead for some time, having heard 1) that it was a retelling of Fall of the House of Usher and 2) it had a nonbinary protag, but kept backburnering it. Then my book club ended up reading Poe's House of Usher this month and I followed that up with watching The Bloodhound, a modern adaptation of the short story (it's REALLY BAD, would not recommend), so I decided this would be the month to (finally!) read it. It also shoehorns nicely with the horror theme I'd been going for with my reviews for this event :)
What Moves is indeed a retelling of Usher, but in the place of Poe's nameless narrator is veteran soldier Alex Easton, a character entirely of Kingfisher's creation, who comes hand-in-hand with a fictional European country and language to round out their background. Easton journeys to the Usher estate upon hearing that their childhood friend Madeline is gravely ill, only to encounter a house oppressive in its decay, with grounds populated by disturbingly strange wildlife. Easton finds that it's not just Madeline who has fallen ill; her brother Roderick too suffers from what seems some unknown malady that fills him with a debilitating fear.
Kingfisher sticks fairly close to the original story, but puts her own disquieting spin on the events which nonetheless manage to feel very much within the spirit of the original. Having reread the original recently I was struck with how much time Poe spends just describing the house and the tarn; building up the atmosphere. I very much appreciated Kingfisher playing to this (every mention of the tarn right there at the start had me cheering like a sportsball fan) and building off of it. I personally caught on to where Kingfisher was going very early, but as it was right up my alley, I had an absolute blast reading anyway.
(Also, side note to say that this book is aesthetically VERY NICE. The cover rocks, the end paper illustrations are gorgeous (and spooky!), and even the house detail beneath the dust jacket is a real nice touch. A++ on book design alone.)
What Moves is a quick read, easily managed in one sitting, that expands on the source material without being a simple retread. I also really enjoyed all the characters, even Madeline and Roderick (and the gross old house and the grosser tarn). Easton makes for a great protagonist, and the country of Gallacia is also fairly interesting, especially as its culture and language are described in contrast with the rest of Europe/America—-I also just personally enjoyed that this was not a modern retelling, that Kingfisher works Gallacia into the broader history and time period of the original House of Usher.
What Moves maintains a nicely creepy atmosphere throughout, and while I wouldn't consider it outright scary, it's a fun read, especially if you're looking for a quick, not-too-spooky book to finish off spooky month.
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"Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
My day 26: Alibi sentence. Arms are a mess, so I've been AFK.
Btw, do we have anyone lined up to host November? Any volunteers?
The tally
( Tally )
Day 24: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) alightbuthappypen, badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cmk418, cornerofmadness, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme
Day 25: alightbuthappypen, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cmk418, cornerofmadness, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme
When you check in, please say what day(s) you’re checking in for. You can join in or take a break at any time; you’re always welcome back. And please let me know if I’ve missed you.
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I've been working on a system of noting down things for the blog post as I go through the week. ( Read more... )
At board game club, someone brought along a copy of Finspan, the fish-themed spin-off of the hit game Wingspan. ( Read more... )
While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, we also played a card game called Tacta. ( Read more... )
Since I've been playing a few logic puzzle games on the computer lately, Steam has started suggesting more that I might like. I've tried out a few demos, including:( Read more... )
I mentioned last week that I'd signed up for a new service that sends notifications when an author has a new book out. I've received several notifications since then; none of them for the authors I'm really interested in, but the level of activity is promising.
Around the World in Eighty Emails continues. Phileas Fogg and his entourage have just set sail from India to Rangoon.
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Kielbasa, apples (Lucy Glo, Calville Blanc D'hiver, Bramley Seedling), 2 heads of garlic, a tiny cipollini onion (given gratis to get me to try them from the apple farmers), gingerdoodle cookies, dark chocolate walnut cookies, a baguette, also picked up a friend's CSA box as they were out of town: a slicer tomato, a butterkin squash, gold potatoes, a small head of broccoli, broccolini, turnips with their greens, bok choy, red beets (without their greens), 2 yellow onions, and a head of red cabbage about the size of a grapefruit.
I'll make a toasted caprese sandwich, braise the kielbasa with the apples and cabbage, maybe make Korean spicy pork with the bok choy and broccoli, maybe roast the turnips and make soup.
I don't get a CSA box because it is too much vegetable for me to eat in a week. Even if I split a box with other people, that's still a lot of vegetables coming at you ever week.
I went to see a Halloween-themed Looney Tunes shorts program after the market, and then the new Frankenstein (which is very good and also very Romantic in the Romanticism movement sense of the word).
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#31: Read a book that is longer than the previous book.
In the absence of an obvious candidate, I decided this was my opportunity to finally get around to Harley Quinn: Redemption by Rachael Allen, which I've been meaning to read since I finished the previous book of the series last year. Then it took a couple of weeks for the library's copy to come in (during which I read other things, but nothing that fit the prompt), and then another week or so for me to properly get into it -- not because it's not good, but because one of the things it's good at is the sense of dread that pervades the first half, which had me reading a chapter or two and then getting stressed and putting it down again. Once the shoe had dropped and the plot really got going, I finished it in a day.
This was the third and final part of a trilogy, which I read at least partly because I was curious about how Allen was going to manage writing an inspirational young adult trilogy featuring a character whose standard origin story ends with her falling into a murderous cult and becoming a homicidal supervillain. That -- obviously, in retrospect -- doesn't happen in this version, where Harley gets a lucky break that leads to her having a significantly better emotional support network than in the standard version, so she has some wobbles but never loses herself and the darkest she gets is 'vigilante with somewhat questionable methods'. The first two books take an interesting stance that could be summed up as "Harley's standard origin story is what people think they know", so you get to see events that become rumours that resemble the standard origin story, but also see how the rumours are often missing or misrepresenting key details and in some cases are just plain wrong.
The third book has two things to achieve: first, to tell an exciting story about Harley and her allies investigating a series of kidnappings that the police don't seem interested in, which it does effectively, and second, to thread the needle of paying off the story's themes and plot threads while bringing the story to an end suitable for a young adult audience, which I'm not convinced it achieves. The author palms a few cards in order to bring the story to a tidy conclusion, which I found a bit too tidy; it gives up all pretence that this version of Harley is ever going to be a villain, even just in the minds of the public, and lets her settle down and enjoy the rest of her life without any lingering traces of the bad reputation that was gathering around her in the earlier chapters. It feels kind of like it's saying that all Harley's adventures are now over, which feels particularly odd since this version of Harley is still barely out of her teens. I would have appreciated a few loose ends, some indication that although Harley has resolved the main issues she still has adventures ahead of her.
Overall, I did enjoy the trilogy and I'm glad I read it.
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Doing my Least Favorite Maintenance Task, i.e., updating the relay, and think I’ve finally gotten enough of a process down that it should be easier in future. Maybe.
Did have to buy more disk space for the VPS, though, and I really need rustup not to take over a gigabye of disk space. Like, dude. Wut???
Leave a comment.+
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I can never resist a fic-related meme, so of course I had to do this one I've seen going around lately:
Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.
For each letter, I've just picked the one that comes first alphabetically. I will note that this leaves a couple of my stories out of consideration entirely because they start with non-letter characters. But never mind those, let's se what the alphabet gives us.
A - After the World (Good Omens (TV)/Disco Elysium, Aziraphale, Crowley, Harry du Bois (sort of))
B - Back from Outer Space (Gravity Falls, Bill Cipher/Ford Pines)
C - Captive Audience (The Good Place, Vicky, Janet)
D - The Dad Joke (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Frisk)
E - Earthly Pleasures (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
F - Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope (Disco Elysium, Harry du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi)
G - Galactic Peace Never Solved Anything (Farscape, John Crichton)
H - Hair Today, Gun Tomorrow (Blake's 7, Jenna Stannis, Jarriere, Jarvik)
I - I Could Give All to Time Except (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale)
J - Just a Few Bonecalls (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Papyrus)
K - Keep One Place, Just for Us (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale, Crowley)
L - The Last Stop on the Tour (Doctor Who/Once Upon a Time, Clara Oswald, Emma Swan)
M - Maybe This Time (Doctor Who, Twelfth Doctor/Missy)
N - The Natural Attraction of Opposites (physics anthropomorfic, electron/positron)
O - The Observer Effect (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley, Gabriel, Beelzebub)
P - The Pale, the Sea, and the Shore (Disco Elysium/Our Flag Means Death, Lena, Edward "Blackbeard" Teach)
Q - A Question of Interior Design (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
R - A Re-Examination of the Origins of the Doctor Myth (Doctor Who, OCs)
S - Save the Date (Doctor Who, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, multiple Doctors)
T - That Thing They Say About the Road to Hell (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale, hints of Aziraphale/Crowley)
U - Uncommanded and Unforbidden (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
V - Vaster Than Empires (Doctor Who/Farscape, Zotoh Zhaan/Jabe)
W - Waning (The A Capella Version) (Farscape, Stark)
X -
Y - You (Gravity Falls, Stan Pines, Ford Pines)
Z - The Zombie Master, or PGP of the Living Dead (Blake's 7, Kerr Avon, Roj Blake, Vila Restal, Del Tarrant, Dayna Mellanby, Soolin)
That's 25 letters represented out of 363 fics. You'd think by now I'd have written something starting with X, but no.
And, man, that's an interesting list of fics. I suppose it does actually represent my fic-writing range pretty well? Certainly there's a good mix of fandoms (with that period where I spewed forth insane numbers of Good Omens fics accurately represented). And quite a time span, too, with a couple of things I wrote just this year, and a few I wrote decades ago in what feels like an entirely different world, when I was an entirely different person and fandom was, you guessed it, entirely different. Or at least very different, anyway.Current Mood:  busy
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Okay so here's me pushing the boundaries of "you can review anything" even further. Have y'all heard about Library Extension? It's a Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension that pops a box almost seamlessly into major book sites, like Amazon, Kobo, Google Books and GoodReads, and tells you if any of pre-defined set of libraries has that book.
It searches by title rather than ISBN so it picks up physical, ebook and audiobook editions of the title you're looking at. And links you straight to the page to borrow.
It currently has the catalogue of over 5000 libraries, including catalogues of subscription services like Kobo Plus, Scribd and Everand. And if they don't have your local library you can ask and they'll try to add it.
Unfortunately it works on desktop browsers. And the title search does occasionally give you a random title and not the one you're looking at. But overall 9/10 will make my TBR list groan until it dies no regretsCurrent Music: Ricky Martin - She's all I ever had Current Mood:  sick
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Full Title: 生き甲斐 Ikigai: Giving Every Day Meaning and Joy
Author: Yukari Mitsuhashi
First Published: In Great Britain by Kyle Books, an Imprint of Octopus Publishing Group LtD, 2018
"The Japanese word ikigai is formed of two Japanese characters, or kanji: 'iki' [生き], meaning life, and 'gai' [甲斐], meaning value or worth. Ikigai, then, is the value of life, or happiness in life. Put simply, it's the reason you get up in the morning." - That's the summary on the back of the book.
This is a quick and thoughtful read. I'm a distractable person with a wandering mind, and it still only took me about an hour to reread this cover to cover. Here are some thoughts.
Call it morbid curiosity or a guilty pleasure, but I read self-help books sometimes, including bad ones. It's a good idea to take life advice books with a grain of salt, and perhaps Ikigai is no different. Even so, I like this book. Nothing felt out of place or without meaning. There are no religious undertones that I noticed, nor does the author have the attitude that your purpose in life is to make money. She does her best to show the reader what the "value of life" means to her, and the anecdotes she used from others are brief, but effective.
I think perhaps my favorite thing the author said was toward the end, on page 89: "I think having ikigai ensures that I will never be bored until the day I die. Maybe that's happiness. You keep chasing your ikigai and one day you just die." This made me think of hobbies we passionately engage with and why we have them. If I had to call anything my ikigai, it would probably be writing fanfiction.
A book like this has its place if you need a quick boost, or moment to think deeply about what you love and why it gets you out of bed in the morning. It doesn't have to be a job or family, though it can be those things. It just has to be true, and yours. Reading this feels meditative, in a way.
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Been catching up on Vampire Princess Miyu as a way to go with the Halloween thing without doing too much about it. Its still haunting, and it has become one of my all-time favorites. I'm hoping to finally finish the series and the OAV which I also watched way back then on VHS.
(In fact, that was the first time I began watching it.)
I'm also watching episodes of Ghost Sweeper Mikami with the same goal of finishing it up as well.
Anyone here also watching Horror/Supernatural themed Anime this month?
 Current Music: Culture Club- Karma Chameleon
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This is Chicago. This is America
I'll be back with other things to say, happy things, or at least I hope so.
But right now, I give you this, taken as a screen shot from video a neighbor took as the ICE thugs ambushed him, and who shared it on some local news sites.
It's my city.
It's my adopted country.
He's my neighbor.
He's my brother.
They don't care.
The cruelty, the racism and xenophobia, is the point.
Current Mood:  distressed Current Music: The Rose, Seattle concert Current Location: the living room
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Meme taken from fiachairecht
Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.
A — Apotheosis (Secret Wars (Hickman/Ribić 2015 mini-series); Doom & Strange; gen; 1k)
B — Between the Devil and the Dust (Star Wars, sequel, prequel and original trilogies; Rey, Luke & Anakin; gen; 7k)
C — Coming Forth by Day (MCU Black Panther & Ancient Egyptian Religion; Shuri, Killmonger & various assorted gods; gen; 25k)
D — The Devil Went Down to New Jersey (Hamilton musical; Burr; gen; >1k)
E — Every Heart That Beats For Liberty (Rogue One; Jyn & Ensemble; gen; 4k)
F — Five people on StarKiller Base who didn't listen to Anakin Skywalker (and one who did) (Star Wars, prequel and sequel trilogies; Anakin & Force Awakens ensemble; gen; 3k)
G — God Games (Ambition (ESA Short film); Apprentice & Master; gen; >1k)
H — The Hawk and the Bat (Marvel 616 & DC comics; Steph Brown & Kate Bishop; gen; 7k)
I — If at first you don't succeed... (Try. Try again.) (Ancient Rome RPF; Original female time traveller; gen; 4k)
J
K (I do have one piece of art, but the meme specifies fics)
L — Lies told by firelight (Loki Agent of Asgard; Verity & Loki; gen; 2k)
M — Mirage (Star Wars sequel trilogy; Rey; gen; 3k)
N — Nameless (Ancient History RPF; Hannibal Barca/Scipio Africanus; >1k)
O — Out of the Cold (Captain America and the Winter Soldier; Original female penguin scientist; gen; 6k)
P — The Public Thing (Star Wars Clone Wars; Rex/Riyo Chuchi; 30k)
Q — Qabârum (MCU & Ancient Mesopotamian Religion; Gamora & Natasha Romanov; gen; 3k)
R — Retrograde (Marvel comics; Valeria Richards; gen; 3k)
S — Strange Aeons (Marvel comics; Victor von Doom; gen; 7k)
T — The Tale of Lightsabre the Blue (Star Wars sequel trilogy; Rey & Ensemble; gen; 3k)
U — The Uncertainty Principle (Marvel comics, Young Justice cartoon & thought experiments; Cassie Lang & Wally West; gen; 3k)
V
W — We built this city on rock 'n' roll (Sucker Punch movie; Rocket; gen; 1k)
X
Y
Z — Zero Sum Game (Secret Wars (Hickman/Ribić 2015 mini-series); Victor von Doom; gen; 1k)
21/26 (116 fics on ao3 -- I have 122 works on there but 6 are art)
I THINK I MIGHT LIKE GEN
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Oct. 25th, 2025 @ 02:02 pm
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Last night genarti and I took advantage of Skirball Theater's remote Halloween production, a virtual Phantom of the Opera broadcast live every night for the next two weeks from a tiny apartment in New York City with a handful of actors, a variety of very small sets and very large cardboard props, and a lot of neat visual/camera tricks.
As a bonus feature, you can see exactly how most of the visual/camera tricks work because there's a second camera set up from the front of the apartment that shows the broader view of the cast and crew rushing around to cram themselves into the tiny sets and lurk in front of walls to cast dramatic shadows and so on. As a viewer, you always have the option to toggle between the main, intended view and the backstage view to see how they're doing whatever they're doing -- tbh this in itself made it worth the price of admission for me, as a person who loves practical effects. See Carlotta's entry evoked by a giant high-heeled foot and then toggle over to the crew member carefully dangling the foot into the frame! Superb!
The production itself evokes the aesthetics of German expressionist film, with an operatic organ soundtrack and most of the dialogue conveyed by classic silent film inter-, sub- or supertitles. It's a shock when the Phantom speaks out loud to Christine, and she speaks back to him. When Raoul says he heard someone in her dressing room, Christine looks understandably baffled by the way this breaks the rules: how could a silent film man hear an angel speak?
Christine can also break the silent film framework to sing, as trained, and, eventually, talk out loud about the Phantom as well as to him, but not about anything else. I love this conceit and I think it's probably the coolest thing the show does thematically. genarti remarked while watching that she'd also never seen a Phantom with this much actual opera in it. The production is definitely interested in Opera qua opera -- trying to say something about Art and the temporality of all artistic media and the fact that opera itself is a dying form, and tbh I'm not sure that it fully landed for me. However this may have been because these Themes were mostly conveyed in a big speech by the Phantom actor at the beginning as he puts on his makeup, and the biggest technical problem with the show (at least on the night that we saw it) was that the Phantom actor's mic was way out of balance with the background music and he was always kind of hard to hear. Which perhaps is thematic in and of itself!
Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience, worth my $20 to sit on my couch with the lights out and toggle between a Spooky Silent Phantom and a tiny apartment full of theater professionals moving tiny sets back and forth to make Spooky Silent Phantom happen, would recommend.
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A YA novel about five friends who once played a spooky game that only four of them survived. Four years later, their friendship now broken, the ghost of their dead friend returns to drag them into a gameworld based on Japanese folklore. They must play again, for higher stakes, or else.
I like Japanese folklore, "years ago our group of friends did something bad that's now come back to haunt us," and deathworlds/gameworlds. This book sometimes hit the spot for me but more often didn't; it feels like the bones of a good book that needed a couple more drafts. The main issue, I think, is pacing. It's very fast-paced once it hits the gameworld, to the point where it feels like it's rushing from one scenario to the next, without having time to breathe. This also affects character. The characters are there, but they're a bit shallow because of the go-go-go pacing.
The best parts are a really excellent twist I did not at all see coming, and the scene where they all have to play truth or dare with younger versions of themselves at the ages they were when they first played the game. That part digs into character and relationships, not to mention the feeling of that game itself, in a really satisfying way. If the whole book worked on that level, it would have been much better.
There's a sequel that doesn't sound like it goes anywhere interesting.
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Advance reading something, and passed the words "high heid yin". One of my all time favourite Scots expressions, especially when used in the plural, that I still say regularly, including just a week ago when talking to Martin about something in our kitchen. I've also deployed it when asking an audience question 20+ years ago at a history research seminar at Dundee University, though I then felt the need to translate it for the visiting Welsh prof! For non-Scots friends it means someone in authority, a leader.
Checking back here I have mentioned this expression in a friends-locked post before, but it's well worth repeating!
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Alas, Eva has disappeared today and was probably taken by a fox. : (( Her ducklings are all grown up and I do not think they miss her. I shed some tears, but actually more for Egon than for her, because he keeps looking around for her and not finding her. : ( They always stuck together. But I'm actually glad they're not in monogamous pairs like geese, because the other partner can sometimes die of grief when one of them dies. We have also lost a very good brooder. Why can't the fox take males instead, if it has to take our ducks?? But I'm not surprised it took Eva, because she was the one always wandering off from the rest of the flock, with Egon following after. She was also blind on one eye.
ETA: OMG, EVA IS BACK!!! Where on earth has she been?? She was gone for like five hours, which never happens. Whatever she was doing, I am VERY glad to have her back. <3 <3
I did not sign up for Yuletide, sigh. I am just so busy right now, and it felt like too much pressure. Perhaps I will treat. But I did sign up for the Get Your Words Out challenge to write 15 days in November and 15 in December. I WILL finish that longfic.
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It is once again time for a dream roundup!
( Dreams from August to October. )
It didn't occur to me until I looked at all of these together that I've had multiple dreams about bears lately. Perplexing! Bears aren't really something I often have on the mind.
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