What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

(Titan Books, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

T. Kingfisher seems to have cornered the market in an intriguing subgenre: novels not exactly re-writing classic horror stories but visiting their worlds. The Twisted Ones collides with Arthur Machen’s “The White People”, while The Hollow Places owes quite a lot to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (specifically that novel’s “Wood Between the Worlds”). Each novel contains some very chilling scenes, marred by others where the narrator tells us that we are in a horror novel (“Oooh look, this is just like Algernon Blackwood/C.S. Lewis!!!—and I only very lightly paraphrase). Each, however, can be recommended for fans of the originals. “Sequels by other hands” of well-known stories, of course, are legion, but these are playful encounters with scenarios we know rather than pedestrian rip-offs.

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Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.