#Review - What Feasts at Night by T Kingfisher

What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, 2)

T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 13 February 2024
Available as: HB, 176pp, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781803369686

What Feasts at Night is a welcome sequel to What Moves the Dead, as T Kingfisher returns to the Sworn Soldier Alex Easton, citizen of a Ruritanian tinged Balkan state of Gallacia. Easton is the Sworn Soldier, an action which means that ka adopts a special set of pronouns used in Gallacia for such military folk. (Gallacia has many sets of pronouns including for example some used only for God and others for priests).

As we saw in What Moves..., Alex has come back from the wars with a case of "soldier's heart", what we would call PTSD and this book, like the previous one, eloquently chronicles kas struggles with that.  What Feasts... will, unsurprisingly, bring Alex, kas batman, Angus, and their friend, the British mycologist Miss Potter, into a new confrontation with monsters as they plan a holiday in Alex's remote hunting lodge in the backwoods. 

I felt the story in this book was more straightforward than the previous one, with less of a feeling of conspiracy and active evil and more of an air of sadness and dislocation, the monster more an obvious victim than an active evil. Kingfisher has fun with tropes of the sub-genre - the villagers shunning the afflicted location, worries about pitchfork-wielding mobs, conspiracies of sience about what might be happening - all blended with redoubtable locals (the cook/ housekeeper referred to as "the Widow" and her son, Bors) and a creeping sense of menace because of course we, the readers, are allowed to know just slightly more, or at least, believe slightly more, about what is coming than the protagonists). Being more straightforward doesn't make it any less entertaining - although I could have wished that Miss Potter was a bit more central to the action, as in the previous book - rather it adds resonance because the fungal related events of the previous book lurk in the background, as does Alex's trauma in the war, but this story isn't a recapitulation of that. 

Rather, I think, we can see Kingfisher here having fun exploring a slightly different subgenre of classic horror - hopefully that will continue into future adventures of Alex, Angus and Miss Potter in more drippy, depressing parts of Gallacia.

For more information about What Feasts at Night, see the publisher's website here.