eBook
English language
Published Feb. 13, 2024 by Titan Books.
THE 2025 HUGO AND LOCUS AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST NOVELLA The hair-raising follow-up to the award-winning What Moves the Dead. Alex Easton returns to their home country of Gallacia, only to be confronted by a strange new horror. When Alex Easton travels to Gallacia as a favour to their friend, Britain's foremost mycologist Miss Potter, they find their home empty, the caretaker dead, and the grounds blanketed by an uncanny silence. The locals won't talk about what happened to the caretaker. None of them will set foot on the grounds. Whispers of an unearthly breath-stealing creature from Gallacian folklore don't trouble practical Easton. But as their sleep is increasingly disturbed by vivid nightmares and odd happenings perplex the household, they are forced to confront the possibility that there is more to the old folk stories than they'd like to believe. A dark shadow hangs over Easton's house. And nobody will …
THE 2025 HUGO AND LOCUS AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST NOVELLA The hair-raising follow-up to the award-winning What Moves the Dead. Alex Easton returns to their home country of Gallacia, only to be confronted by a strange new horror. When Alex Easton travels to Gallacia as a favour to their friend, Britain's foremost mycologist Miss Potter, they find their home empty, the caretaker dead, and the grounds blanketed by an uncanny silence. The locals won't talk about what happened to the caretaker. None of them will set foot on the grounds. Whispers of an unearthly breath-stealing creature from Gallacian folklore don't trouble practical Easton. But as their sleep is increasingly disturbed by vivid nightmares and odd happenings perplex the household, they are forced to confront the possibility that there is more to the old folk stories than they'd like to believe. A dark shadow hangs over Easton's house. And nobody will rest until justice is done.
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 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.
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 …
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.)
