A 2022 retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher.
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that kan childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, ka races to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.
What ka finds there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsating tarnnote . Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and an American doctor traumatised by the Civil War, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
Note that, as a Gallacian soldier, Alex's pronouns are Ka/Kan rather than She/Her.
What Moves the Dead contains examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: Potter is very impressed with how thoroughly the fungus has taken over a hare's body, as well as how it's able to continue moving the body despite its dismemberment, staying put to observe even when everyone else screams in horror and gets as far away as possible. However, she still thinks it's dangerous and needs to be destroyed, in stark contrast to Madeline, who's not only perfectly happy with the tarn possessing her body but regards it as a child, teaching it how to speak and delighting in how clever it is and how fast it's learning.
- All There in the Manual: The afterword mentions that the tarn is a symbiosis of biofilm, fungi, and macroalgae that over time developed into a crenellated structure capable of acting as a brain using electrochemical signaling which the characters would've had no way of finding out, it being the 1890s.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: There is a complicated gender element to sworn soldiers. Once women join the military, they're more soldiers than women and are afforded certain rights they wouldn't have otherwise. Gallacian women, therefore, often join the military to get said rights as well as money, but Alex hints in kan narration that there are some people who just don't identify as women and, in Gallacia, becoming a soldier is the closest thing you can get to changing your gender, as it gives you a legal way to change your pronouns. It's also left unclear how Alex kanself would identify, given the modern understanding of non-binary people and trans men, considering that ka publicly says ka joined up because someone had to send money home to the family, but ka would still bind kan breasts even before the military and mentions that ka is also of the mindset that ka's more of a soldier than anything else.
- Ascended Extra: Madeline Usher never even speaks in the original short story, while in this version she's thoroughly fleshed out and the story actually spends more time with her than Roderick. She's also the catalyst for the entire plot, which is all about the gradual reveal that she's the host for a fungus that threatens humanity.
- Bittersweet Ending: Madeline and Roderick are dead, as is the tarn; while the protagonists are obviously glad about the latter, depending on the reader's (and indeed Vernon's) point of view this can also be seen as tragic, since the tarn is the mental equivalent of a small child and it didn't realise most humans don't want to be taken over and puppeteered. However, since Alice killed herself rather than continue as a host for the fungus, Alex regards it as a monster who ate kan friend, ka weeps with relief upon learning that ka and the other residents of the house have been drinking well water and haven't been exposed to the tarn, and the simple fact that it's the 1890s and the protagonists have no realistic way to communicate with the fungus safely, their choice to protect humanity by burning down the house and destroying the tarn is completely understandable.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: The lake lights up at night like stars. It's strange glowing algae, and Alex notes that ka has seen similar on sailing ships.
- Body Horror: Creatures infected by the fungus have lungs full of it. It's explicitly noted that this process dissolves all of the structures inside the lungs (they're not hollow bags, there's stuff in there) to make room. And it gets worse from there.
- The Captain: Alex's rank is actually Lieutenant, but ka was Roderick's commanding officer in the recent war.
- Dead All Along: Madeline doesn't have catalepsy, or at least not anymore. Her "symptoms" are actually the result of being an imperfectly animated corpse.
- Disease Bleach: Madeline's mysterious illness has reduced all the hair on her body to fragile white wisps, shocking Alex at first sight. Subverted — the "hair" is actually fungal hyphae.
- Driven to Suicide: Madeline's maid, Alice, killed herself a few months ago by jumping from the roof. She was infected by the tarn and enlisted as a host for Madeline to teach it, but found the whole thing too horrible to deal with.
- Festering Fungus: Signifying its decay, the lands surrounding the house of Usher harbor an exceptional abundance of mushrooms (which is what drew the mycologist Eugenia Potter to it), while the house itself constantly has attention drawn to its infestation of mold and fungi. The worst of it inhabits the tarn beside the house — the water is so stagnant with fungus that it's almost gelatinous, and a Sickly Green Glow sometimes emanates from under its surface.
- Gallows Humor: All the veterans engage in it, Alex at one point explicitly comparing their jokes to the ones pointing out that the enemy you're about to charge already has their cannons lined up.
- Eagle Land: Alex considers Americans brash, rude, and not too bright. Denton being an ex-soldier like kan softens kan slightly on him.
- Hair-Raising Hare: The hares around the tarn are...weird. The village is full of stories about how they're shapeshifted witches or possessed by the devil, and given how they all have a zombie-esque shuffle and tend to just stare at people, it's not hard to see why. It gets worse when Alex shoots one for Denton to study, and the hare, with half its head blown off, gets up and goes on with its business like nothing happened.
- Historical Character's Fictional Relative: The British mycologist is not Beatrix Potter, renowned mycologist and children's book author. She's her fictional relative, who has a lot in common.
- Impoverished Patrician: The Ushers of course, as in the original story.
- Innocently Insensitive: Americans don't have sworn soldiers, so Denton is somewhat confused as to how to address Alex (he never does figure out if he should stand when ka enters a room or not) and asks some rude questions when they first meet, which ka regards with weary exasperation. But Denton's basically a good guy and doesn't mean to offend, and in short order he gets it together.
- It Began with a Twist of Fate: The whole plot begins because Madeline had an episode of catalepsy and fell into the tarn, which allowed the fungus to enter her body. Aaron the manservant mentions at the end of the story that the inhabitants of the house never drank from the tarn since there was a deep well on the property that they used instead; while the fungus had been able to get into the hares that drank the lake water, without Madeline's acceptance of it into her body, plus going on to nurture and teach it, the tarn would probably never have become a danger to humans.
- It Can Think: The tarn is very intelligent - after all, it's a fungus that has learned to understand such insane concepts as vision and even speech. It just hasn't grasped that most people find animated corpses and being assimilated into a hive mind horrifying.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Madeline calls the tarn infesting her body va and van, the Gallacian pronouns for a child, since that's what she regards the fungus as. Alex refuses to do the same; "It was a horror and it had eaten my friend."
- Kill It with Fire: Everyone is enormously relieved to discover that burning the corpses keeps the tarn from raising them.
- Loophole Abuse: The first Gallacian woman to become a sworn soldier was able to because, although "everyone knew" women didn't join the army, there was no actual rule against it, and since all soldiers use the pronouns "ka" and "kan", none of the documentation says "he" or "him".
- Mercy Kill: Roderick tries this on Madeline about halfway through the book, no longer able to bear the thing controlling her body. It doesn't take.
- No Biochemical Barriers: Vernon set out to deliberately address this, due to one of her friends ranting on social media about how horror stories with fungus-infested-brains are unrealistic, since the interfaces are deeply incompatible. So in this story, the tarn has been infesting and controlling the local wildlife for so long that it's learned how to comprehend and use physical senses like sight, and thus it's capable of being taught by Madeline to speak and emulate human behaviour.
- Mundane Solution: Once the immediate threat of the tarn-infested Madeline is dealt with, Alex and Denton still have to figure out what to do about the tarn itself, since they can't exactly burn a lake. Cue Angus and Miss Potter turning up with twelve hundred pounds of sulfur, which is commonly used to treat fungal ailments in fruit trees and which they bought from several nearby orchards; once dumped into the tarn it manages to kill the fungus in the water.
- Murder Water: It's no secret that there's something extremely sinister about the lake and its sick fish. The local people know better than to drink from it, but unfortunately the local wildlife doesn't realise the danger...
- Non-Malicious Monster: The tarn doesn't want to hurt anyone, and if you managed to explain to it why what it was doing horrified people, it would probably stop. But it's so alien in both senses and outlook that this wasn't possible in a way that was safe, especially in the 1890s, not to mention the trauma all the characters had been through.
- Not His Sled: The Fall of the House of Usher famously ends with the reveal that when Madeline "died", she was actually just having a catalepsy fit, and the narrator and Roderick unknowingly (probably) buried her alive. Here, Alex goes to check on her body because ka is on edge from everything going in the manor...and discovers that she has a broken neck and clearly hand-shaped bruises. Then it's later revealed that Madeline had already been dead for at least a month before Alex arrived — which didn't prevent her from moving and talking, and later continues not to despite the broken neck.
- Obliviously Evil: The tarn doesn't realize it's doing anything wrong, but unfortunately, without ever meaning to hurt anyone it could assimilate the entire human race, and there's no safe way to explain why this would be bad.
- Parasite Zombie: Both the hares and Madeline herself. They start as a Technically-Living Zombie before the infestation gets too bad.
- Pronoun Trouble: Gallacian has six sets of pronouns: one for men, one for women, one for rocks, one for God, one for children and priests/nuns, and one for soldiers. This causes some translation headaches when the soldiers hire out internationally, but mostly people muddle along (a soldier's a soldier, at the end of the day). The child pronoun causes slightly more trouble — while Gallacian does have separate terms for 'boy' and 'girl', it is extremely taboo to call a child by adult pronouns, tantamount to saying you're a paedophile. Hence native Gallacian speakers are never quite comfortable in languages that lack this separation (a Gallacian spy once blew their cover because they were just a little too hesitant to call a child "she"), and new learners are prone to greatly embarrassing themselves.
- Proud Warrior Race: Alex describes the Gallacians this way, but is also quite self deprecating about their history - to hear kan tell it, they kept picking glorious fights and losing.
- Reckless Gun Usage: Conversed when Alex explains why ka doesn't sleep with a gun under kan pillow: ka tried that, when ka was younger and stupider, and then it went off in the night and nearly blew kan head off, plus causing kan lasting tinnitus.
- Ruritania: The dust jacket actually calls the country they're in Ruritania as if that was the name. It's not, it's Ruravia. But Ruravia is a small, fictional, and poor European monarchy.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: All of the main characters except Madeline, to one degree or another. In particular they discuss their shared episodes with (what we now call) PTSD, nightmares, and general world weariness.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Potter is resentful that, as a woman, she's not allowed to join various mycological societies even while far less qualified men are welcome. At the story's climax, it emerges that Madeline's motivation for welcoming the tarn into her body is her intense frustration at never being allowed to do anything other than be an object for men to admire, and she felt that hosting and teaching the tarn human behaviour, treating it as a child, gave her a purpose.
- Stiff Upper Lip: Alex notes this about the British in general and Potter in particular.
- Technically a Smile: Alex finds Madeline apparently sleepwalking, and after she has some difficulty speaking she smiles — which looks more like a scream. Alex, narrating, says that "I do not delude myself that I have seen every way the human mind can fail, though I have seen a hundred ways that soldiers and civilians can break in war. But I had never seen a smile like that." Understandable, since it's actually the tarn controlling Madeline's body and trying to smile as it probably had seen her do in the past.
- Willing Channeler: Madeline treats the tarn like a child, has been teaching it to speak, and doesn't think its control of her body is at all burdensome.
- Zombie Infectee: Having spent several days inhaling spores in the fungus-ridden house and drinking its water, Alex and everyone else develop a dread that the tarn's already gotten into them, too, even as they work out how to destroy it. Ultimately subverted: the tarn spreads through contact with its water, and the water they were using actually came from a well inside the house that had no connection to the tarn, so they remain uninfected.
