What Feasts at Night

September 1, 2023

Having survived the awful events at the Usher mansion featured in Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead, retired soldier Alex Easton heads to their family hunting lodge in What Feasts at Night--and does not find peace of mind (150,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

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January 8, 2024
In the haunting second installment of Hugo and Nebula Award winner Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series (after What Moves the Dead), reluctant, battle-damaged hero Alex Easton, who uses the pronouns ka and kan, returns to kan childhood home in the grim and Gothic countryside of Gallacia. It should be a routine, even boring, visit to the Easton family hunting lodge. Instead, Alex arrives to find the old caretaker has died, and the village buzzing with rumors that the supposed lung disease that killed him was in fact something far more sinister. To Alex, a practical old soldier, the villagers’ tales seem fanciful, the kind of thing one might tell to scare a child—until the new housekeeper’s son falls ill the same way, and Alex begins to have strange nightmares. Something has awoken in the Easton hunting lodge, and it wants to steal the very breath from all of the inhabitants’ lungs. Moving away from the Edgar Allan Poe story that inspired the first entry in the series, this sequel offers more surprises and just as many moments that will haunt readers’ dreams. Kingfisher’s winning formula of creepy folklore, affable protagonists, familiar Gothic tropes, and truly unsettling horror imagery makes this sing.

February 1, 2024
In a suitably atmospheric follow-up to What Moves the Dead (2022), Alex Easton is headed back to their ancestral Gallacian lodge and more trouble than they bargained for. After the nightmarish events at their friend Maddy Usher's house, all Easton dreams of is a nice, new routine on home turf. However, they discover that caretaker Codrin has met an untimely end, so Easton and old war buddy Angus are left to figure out what has occurred. Joined by the mycologist Miss Potter, they attempt to untangle the strange silence and hideous dreams that the locals claim are due to moroi, a spectre that steals people's breath in the night. Fans will appreciate a budding romance between Angus and Miss Potter as well as the addition of two new characters hired to take over for Codrin at the lodge: Widow Botezatu and her grandson, Bors. The real star is Kingfisher's characterization of Easton, whose war-torn past continually flutters into view like the mysterious white moths that herald the moroi's coming. Another damp, unearthly entry in the developing Sworn Soldier series.

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