In the afterword of The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher writes, “They say all books are in dialogue with other books.” That’s true in that we can trace influences of one author in the books of another, which is just another way of saying that no one writes in a vacuum. In fact, academic careers are made by identifying stuff like that. But those influences, those dialogues, are not often explicit.
In Kingfisher’s three recent forays into horror, they are. I don’t usually group-review books, but there’s enough commonality and enough distinction to make the effort worthwhile, or, as every Freshman English student since the beginning of Composition has written, There are many similarities and many differences. (I write this in honor of the beginning of the academic year, and in solidarity with overworked and undercompensated writing teachers everywhere. )
Kingfisher is known as the author of some terrific children’s fantasy series, Hamster Princess and Dragonbreath, both published under the name Ursula Vernon. And then there’s the adult and YA work, written under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher, which is itself an homage to Ursula Le Guin who, when she published a short story in Playboy (it was “Nine Lives”) was asked to disguise her gender and publish under the initials U.K. Le Guin. She thought that was weird, as in, what would people think her name was — Ulysses Kingfisher? These books include the Temple of the White Rat series, including the Paladin books, fairy tales like Nettle & Bone and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, and the epic webcomic Digger.
And now, horror. Kingfisher is nothing if not serendipitous.
I am, for the most part, a reteller of fairy tales, but retelling pulp horror is really not so different. There is the same process of trying to find the bones of the story, of throwing in references for the reader to pick out and (hopefully) feel a sense of smugness at having gotten the joke.
(Afterword, The Twisted Ones, p. 384)
Personally, I find Kingfisher’s project in retelling pulp horror extremely interesting. Why did she choose horror? Predisposition, interest maybe — who can tell why we’re interested in the things that engross us? It’s a mercurial combination of curiosity and taste. One thing I do know about horror, though — it’s a form that’s overdue for an infusion of fresh...I dunno, blood?
Perspective, maybe. A fierce evaluation of its form, its terms, its potential to reflect reality and interpret the world in ways deeper than just offering the occasional scare. All stories have bones, and once they’re established, the author is off constructing a reality. It’s a reality that, at least implicitly, reacts to, answers, and encompasses the writers that the author has read. That conversation is not often explicit, but it is in Kingfisher’s horror novels, at least so far.
Her three, all published in the last three years, are conversations with classic and early works of horror. The Twisted Ones, published in 2019, is a response to Arthur Machen’s 1904 “The White People.” It’s a “found manuscript” story that’s a worthy starting point for a novel about lost traditions and otherworldliness. In addition to the story itself, Kingfisher takes on a letter about Machen’s story written by H. P. Lovecraft (because of course). Side note: there’s a great discussion about “The White People” at Tor embedded in a long Lovecraft reread. Short version: Lovecraft loved Machen, but he had Thoughts about “The White People” in which he presumed to tell Machen what his story was really about.
Then there’s The Hollow Places, which:
H. P. Lovecraft wrote that “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood was one of the most terrifying stories ever written. Before I read it, I assumed that this probably meant some people in it weren’t white....
(The Hollow Places, p. 353)
Yes, between T. Kingfisher and N.K. Jemison, Lovecraft is beginning to resemble a piñata and, like so many of us, I am here for it. (Once we’re finished with Lovecraft we can take on Chesterton.)
Both novels engage with their sources directly and take their material in new directions. Both are set in rural North Carolina, and both are narrated by protagonists in what is becoming a classic Kingfisher model: practical women whose can push aside panic because they have jobs to do. Mouse/Melissa in The Twisted Ones is called on to clean out her grandmother’s house following the old lady’s largely unlamented death:
My grandmother used to call relatives up to tell them it served them right when their dog died. She was born unkind and graduated to cruel early.
(TTO, p. 2)
Grandmother was also a hoarder, the house is surrounded by woods and there’s something in the woods that really shouldn’t be there. Mouse sticks it out because of a sense of duty to help out her father, a sense of duty that gets her into all kinds of trouble.
Likewise, in The Hollow Places, Carrot/Kara moves into a spare room behind the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, owned by her Uncle Earl, who is the best uncle on the planet, in Hog Chapel, North Carolina. Partly leaving a failed marriage behind, partly flat broke and with no real job prospects, and partly to avoid living with her mother, Carrot quickly finds that Uncle Earl needs help, and she takes over running the museum just in time for things to go Horribly Wrong. (If the Wonder Museum isn’t a real place, it should be). It’s the kind of place where, as Carrot recalls, after seeing Bambi at age 6 and being impressed by Bambi’s father:
The next time I went to the Wonder Museum, I walked up to the mounted elk head and shouted, “Prince!”
My deer-identification skills were not strong at six. My mother, being that sort of person, explained that elk and deer were different species and this wasn’t the Prince.
Uncle Earl, being the sort of person he was, waited until my mother had gone next door and told me that elk were even greater princes of the forest than deer, and that this elk would be honored to be called Prince.
The next time I came back, the plaque next to the elk had been changed, and it now read:
“PRINCE”
Cervus canadensis roosevelti
(THP, pp. 14-15)
Prince plays a large role in the book. “Do objects that are loved know that they are loved?” Carrot wonders (p. 347). Maybe, she decides, ontological implications notwithstanding.
The third of the novels, What Moves the Dead is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher, “ with the addition of one more character, the soldier Easton, and a bunch of new pronouns that belong to the obscure Gallacian language:
Most languages you encounter in Europe have words like he and she and his and hers. Ours has those too, although we use ta and tha and tan and than. But we also have va and var, ka and kan, and a few other specifically for rocks and God.
(What Moves the Dead, p. 22)
Beyond good fun with pronouns, (“You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns,” p. 23), Easton has definite opinions about Roderick Usher’s friend and other guest, an American surgeon named James Denton (“He wore his clothes as if they were clothes rather than symbols of rank,” p. 17), and is impressed with Beatrix Potter’s indominable (imaginary) aunt Eugenia, a mycologist who rather sweeps Angus, Easton’s batman, off his feet.
Machen’s and Blackwood’s stories are rather obscure today, so I won’t spoil them, but it’s impossible to spoil “Usher,” which virtually everyone has read at one time or another. Taking on the plot and telling the tale from a different perspective lends a certain freshness to a story we’ve all known since grade school, so what’s distinctive is not really the plot, but the voice. And Easton’s voice is wry and understated. And despite kan’s prejudice about Americans, ka finds in Denton, a veteran of the American Civil War, a kindred spirit:
His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.
(What Moves the Dead, p. 90)
So, there’s a certain similarity in narrators, and a similar take on the source materials. Well, it’s less a “take” on the sources and more a repurposing. The reconstructed manuscript in Machen’s “The White People” has passed to Mouse’s step-grandfather, and the “hill folk” of Wales translate into North Carolina (this is not as outlandish as it sounds — the mountains are the same ones, formed 460 million years ago and separated as the mid-Atlantic Ridge pushed their respective plates apart, but I digress), but rather than a distant literary story, they things that go bump in the night are waiting in the woods. It’s a marvelous blend of Welsh fairy lore and Appalachian folk memory. Blackwood’s “Willows” intrude on different worlds, wherever they can get their roots in. And the fall of the Usher’s ancestral house is not due to synesthesia and delicate nerves, but something else entirely, something that so unnerves Easton that, ka writes,
We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.
(WMTD, p. 137)
It’s not a monster that terrifies Easton and Denton. In fact, Kingfisher’s horror is a different brand of horror than is common today. Her antagonists are terrifying, but they’re not evil. Evil requires malice (well, the jury is out on Them in The Hollow Places because we don’t know enough about Them. But the thing that opens the way to the willows is less evil than homesick, so I’m sticking with the assertion that the antagonists are not malicious.) They’re less conventionally terrifying than they are simply alien and largely unknowable. Alternate realities trying to survive.
And anyway, the horror component is less important than it might be in the hands of a different novelist. Because these books aren’t really about the terrors, the horror, the ichor and the ick and the nasty squishiness: they’re about the people caught in these circumstances. Kingfisher’s protagonists have the very good luck of making very good, stalwart, and brave friends. There’s Mouse in the hoarder house and her dog Bongo, and Foxy, Tomas and Skip who live in the commune across the road. Carrot has Simon, the barista who works next door to the Wonder Museum and who accompanies Carrot between worlds. Easton has Angus and Miss Potter and Denton (despite that he’s an American).
It’s the people who make the journey worth it. That holds true in genre fiction, as well as real life.
Finally, because I can, I want to offer you a few of my favorite lines from each of the books, because they reflect the tenor of the work so perfectly:
From The Twisted Ones:
Bongo is an excellent watchdog, by which I mean that he will watch very alertly as the serial killer breaks into the house and skins me. (p. 8)
Books on World War II appear spontaneously in any house that contains a man over a certain age. I believe that’s science. (p. 33)
People in books always have such wonderfully clear dreams that show you their secret fears or reveal some key element of their tormented past or whatever. But in reality, if you try to explain a dream, you end up saying, “I was talking to Abraham Lincoln, but he was also sort of my father, and we were in the house I grew up in but the window screen kept falling out and I was trying to wedge it back in, over and over, and I was getting really frustrated and also I wasn’t wearing pants.” (p. 108)
From The Hollow Places:
The rest of the population is mostly tiny organic farmers looking for cheap land, and extremely earnest hippies who want to talk to you about biodiesel. [This sentence makes me feel seen.] (p. 11)
[Carrot is trying to distract herself because, reasons, and she settles on readers who try to boss the writers of fanfic] This was an old, well-worn outrage and I dwelt on it lovingly with my toes in the sand of an alien world and a malign intelligence moving overhead. Part of my brain was screaming that it was small and petty and utterly ridiculous but if I listened, I was lost. I wallowed in petty outrage until I was ready to burn down the internet around fandom’s collective shoulders. (pp. 170-171)
Other people’s horrible relatives are remarkably soothing. You can be comfortably appalled without having to deal with them yourself. (p. 216)
From What Moves the Dead:
I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table, if you don’t stop them. (p. 17)
People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain. (p. 68)
Every Gallacian soldier I know carries at least one bottle of livrit with kan. It reminds us that we are part of a great and glorious tradition of people doing gallant things in the service of a country that can’t find its arse with both hands and a map. (p. 68)
Kingfisher, T. The Twisted Ones, NY: Saga Press 2019.
_____. The Hollow Places. NY: Saga Press, 2020.
_____. What Moves the Dead. NY: Tor Nightfire, 2022.
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