Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

The second entry in T. Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series, What Feasts At Night is another atmospheric novella that prioritizes its foreboding tone paired with its vaguely historic 19th century setting. Unlike What Moves the Dead which was a modern retelling of the classic short poem the Fall of the House of Usher, What Feasts At Night is an original story set in the overgrown woods of the fictional country of Gallacia involving a local superstition in the area affecting Alex Easton’s inherited hunting lodge. While the general tone is carried over from the first novella, the actual plot felt considerably slower paced and lacked the tense buildup that I previously reviewed and appreciated. The “horror” elements were also quite brief and left me a bit underwhelmed despite the appropriately balanced prose and Easton’s signature sarcastic soldier humor. Carrying over majority of Kingfisher’s original cast characters outside of Edgar Allen Poe’s (with the exception of Dr. Denton who is apparently featured as a main character in the upcoming 3rd novella due to be published next year), What Feasts At Night benefits from all of the exposition and Gallacia world-building that was previously introduced in the first book. I had previously critiqued how the first book’s start felt too slow due…

My novella of choice for the obligatory spooky horror read for Halloween, this was an odd read that I have mixed feelings about. It really captures the gothic horror fairytale genre well and feels like a modern reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s literary style (in concept only unfortunately). The narrative themes of humanity and what constitutes being alive is interesting, if only the writing quality matched it. The writing is typically quite readable with great visuals but then Khaw forces complex and obscure vocabulary in randomly that derails the literary flow. It’s as if Khaw flipped open a thesaurus and actively tried to find the most obtuse and unheard of word to give the writing a more classical or educated flair (it doesn’t). You can deduce what the random words mean by using context clues and analyzing the sentence structure of the passage, but the fact that you’re able to do that just shows how out of the place the vocabulary is when the rest of the writing is straightforward and simplistic. Not only that, the writing itself suddenly drops the vague attempt at old English about 30-40 pages in which is also a welcome relief since it wasn’t ever…