What Feasts at Night

T. Kingfisher is one of my favorite authors and I'm always looking for the latest or have a few things from her backlist. What Feasts at Night is a quite good follow up to What Moves the Dead, which is a retelling of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. 

In “Feasts” Alex Easton returns home to Gallacia to find the family's hunting lodge in disrepair and the caretaker no more. The feel is very true to older horror tales, like Dracula, where the “peasants” know the score and the score is Restless Spirits and folk magic/remedies and generally not monkeying around with things best left unmonkeyed around with. This is the book for when you want to crawl into bed at the end of the day and feel safe and warm while things are not all right on the page. 

If I could ask the author anything, it would be why the animal skeletons? I'm not just talking about this book, but a very recurring element of Kingfisher's stories. Often the bones are, um, alive? The author clearly loves animals and so pets have a great chance in these books, but sometimes the pet is a bone dog. You understand. 

In this case, it's not a dog, and the instance is really disturbing, although for you pet people, I'll say it's okay. 

This series will always have a place on my shelves because this style of story takes me make to teen me. A story for the thick anthologies of old horror I used to borrow from the library. In the case of What Moves the Dead, my not insignificant fascination with Poe.