Sworn Soldier by T. Kingfisher
Kingfisher brings a fresh perspective to a Poe short story and an ancient European myth.
This article is not a review (click here to see why). It contains spoilers.
Context
Hares who walk as though they’re on puppet strings and an old friend’s sister dying—can these disturbing events possibly be connected? That’s the mystery that Lieutenant Alex Easton, along with her sarcastic assistant Angus and the formidable amateur mycologist Miss Potter, must solve in What Moves the Dead. The novella is T. Kingfisher’s retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which she fleshes out the answers to questions she had when re-reading Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story. Who is the narrator, and where does he or she come from? What does Roderick do after his sister dies? And most importantly: What causes the fall of the house of Usher?
In Kingfisher’s version, the narrator is a sworn soldier (hence the name of the series) who served in the military of the fictional country of Gallacia in the late 19th century. In Gallacia, those who swear into the military lose their male or female pronouns (along with their hair) and are assigned the pronouns “ka” and “kan.”1 These gender-neutral pronouns are not, however, just for inclusive decoration; they and other special-use pronouns are key to the Gallacian language and play a vital role in the hair-rising climax of the novel.
The second book, What Feasts at Night, is not based on a particular story but uses a mythological creature of old as its base. Easton invites Miss Potter to join her and Angus at her hunting lodge in rural Gallacia. Few villagers are brave enough to venture there because it is supposedly the home of a moroi, the spirit of a dead woman who transforms into a moth to get into people’s rooms while they sleep, before retaking the form of a woman and stealing their breath.2 Easton assumes this is a local superstition to explain a respiratory disease or some other medical condition, but is she too quick to dismiss it? What will she do if it isn’t?
Key Ideas
Even supernatural-seeming horrors have natural causes
Accepting your psychology is better than fighting it
Taking your interests seriously is a delightful character trait
Even supernatural-seeming horrors have natural causes
Kingfisher fleshes out Edgar Allen Poe’s original tale to turn it from a 25-page short story to a 170-page novella, including adding a couple of characters (most notably Angus and Miss Potter), a backstory for the narrator, and a resolution after the climax. But what really struck me was not the addition of these elements nor the heavy dose of humor (which I, as a non-horror reader, deeply appreciated); it was the addition of a cause of the suffering that can be explained via the natural laws of physics and biology.3 Though there is a fantasy element, it simply accentuates the biological aspect.
This addition of a cause results in a universe strikingly different from Poe’s. In Poe’s story, the madness and death that occur have no discernible reason, moral or physical; the conclusion is that the world is malevolent and punishes people without justification. By contrast, in Kingfisher’s story, the world can be scary and unpredictable, but it isn’t impossible to understand. Things happen for a reason—not that there’s some divine consciousness who controls it, but because living organisms act in accordance with their (in this case freaky and parasitic) natures. When calamities happen for no reason, horror is senselessly scary. When it has a cause, there’s orderliness in what seemed at first unintelligible chaos—and in some ways, that’s even scarier, because it’s logically conceivable (if decidedly unlikely).
Accepting your psychology is better than fighting it
Throughout both books, Easton struggles with PTSD (she and other characters often refer to it as “soldier’s heart”). 4She has flashbacks to the war, is unaccountably jumpy at times, and reacts on instinct in a variety of situations. In the first book, she tries to temper these reactions with rationality, distinguishing between the facts of the case and where her mind jumped to.
But in the second book, Easton accepts the effects of soldier’s heart (PTSD) without wallowing in self-pity. For example, rather than pretend the empty, dusty, old hunting lodge isn’t freaking her out, she goes out hunting to escape its dark confines. This approach becomes especially important when dealing with the core threat of the book, when the instincts instilled by the military save her life. “What if” is rarely a question that can be satisfactorily answered in fiction, but I wondered what would have happened if she had continued to suppress the nasty effects of that mental disorder.
Taking your interests seriously is a delightful character trait
Miss Potter’s character, though serving an additional purpose in the first book, is primarily a symbol of people who have unusual interests and nevertheless pursue them passionately. Despite the Royal Mycological Society not accepting papers from women at the time, Miss Potter continues to observe, collect, study, and paint as many species of fungi as she can—not for financial gain or for prestige, since she can gain neither in her society by doing so, but out of a love for knowledge and a fascination with her subject. Despite her interest being weird or even repulsive to many, Easton enjoys her encyclopedic memory on the subject and willingness to share it, reflecting “I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual” (5). Further, Angus woos Miss Potter by assisting her in her quest to locate and paint as many specimens as possible.
People often think of knowledge as an end in itself, a value separate from any potential use it could have. In Miss Potter’s case, her knowledge helps the characters, but it’s also shown to be valuable purely because it’s satisfying to her. Deeper and more varied enjoyment of a topic you care about is a use-value of knowledge on that subject and related fields. Knowledge isn’t inherently good; it’s of potential use to anyone who seeks it.5
Conclusion
Kingfisher brings a fresh perspective to both the classic story and the myth. The addition of cause to Poe’s classic story and of a compassionate look at a psychological disorder to the myth of the moroi, along with humor, delightful side characters, and a fleshed-out eerie setting make for enjoyable reads—but maybe not too close to bedtime.
For the sake of smoothness in reading, I will refer to Easton as she and her, since the character was born female.
Moroi are also called mera or mara in European folk tales, and are the source of the English word “nightmare.” In fact, until the nineteenth century, the word was only used to refer to dreams in which one experienced a feeling of crushing or suffocation; see Judy Allen, Fantasy Encyclopedia (Boston: Kingfisher, 2005), 127.
There is also a Netflix series released in 2023 and set in the contemporary United States called The Fall of the House of Usher, but it combines multiple Poe stories. I have not seen the series, but from reading the summary and an acquaintance's review of it, it also adds a cause, though in this case the cause is moral (the degeneracy of the Usher siblings) and the mechanism is fantastical (a demon-like being).
Kingfisher appropriated this name from Da Costa’s Syndrome, a heart condition originally identified in men during war but now thought to refer to multiple different diseases that can affect both men and women; see https://heart.bmj.com/content/58/4/306.
Knowledge doesn’t exist at all without those who hold it (or held it, in the case of recorded facts and theories). Facts and entities exist independent of anyone being aware of them, but once facts, principles, and the natures of entities are identified or discovered by a person, then they become truths and knowledge.