T. Kingfisher is one of my go-to authors these days, so I snapped this one up even though it’s much shorter than her other works. The other reviewers said it’s a retelling of the Poe story “the Fall of the House of Usher,” a work I had not read. I read the spark notes for that though, and it does seem to follow the same format: narrator shows up to a house of an old friend, Roderick Usher. The house, physically and metaphorically, is falling into ruin Roderick has a sister named Madeline who is also ill/dying.
But it wouldn’t be a T. Kingfisher novel if there weren’t some ordinary thing made creepy and dangerous. In this case it’s a tranquil mountain lake and some hares. The lake (they call it a ‘tarn’) is full of some weird algae or fungus, and the hares around it are “uncanny” in that they don’t act the way one expects a hare to act. They act like animals that have a prion disease, like CWD, actually, and the truth turns out to be not too far off. When they do discover the ill secret behind the house of Usher, I had mixed feelings. Part of me was recoiling, as the characters were, desperate to kill it with fire. The other part of me thought it was a thing of wonder and beauty which would be cherished by all mankind. I guess if you have something like that happen, which camp it falls into depends on if the book is horror or sci-fi.
I enjoyed this book, but it’s not my favorite T. Kingfisher novel. For one, it’s quite short. The audiobook comes in at a little more than five hours, which is why I hadn’t ordered it sooner. Also, it’s basically fan-fiction, which is one of my pet peeves, even though she really explored the concept far deeper than Poe did, as near as I could tell. Kingfisher also does my other pet peeve, which is when a character in a work of fiction has a connection with a real-life person. An English lady who has a talented artist niece named Beatrix Potter is not as egregious as pretending that your main characters are J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, but it was a little fly in the ointment.
One other unsettling thing, which I believe was true in the original, is that I’m not quite sure where this was set. I get that it was the 1800s, and I presume it’s somewhere in Europe, but is it in the British Isles or is it somewhere in France? The main character is Gallican, which allowed Kingfisher to do some fun stuff with pronouns in an obscure language (I don’t know if that’s true or not, I have to look it up–is this the old Celtic language Gaulish or completely invented?) but presumably the Ushers were also Gallican, and yet they are not in their home country anymore? And when they talk about going to the big city, it’s Paris they mention, not London. So is this supposed to be set in a real place, or is it a made-up alternate version of Europe?
Still, I did enjoy this book. It’s nicely creepy and easy to get through.
