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This is the best/worst book to have just gotten into when a bout of insomnia strikes, so you can lie reading in a dark, silent house while the level of creepiness steadily builds, and something outside makes a tok-tok-tok noise

This is one of those books I finished with a profound sigh and a feeling of loss

I'm sure I read The Fall of the House of Usher at some point, but I didn't retain enough that I had any particular expectations for the direction of the plot, etc.

However, I did read Mexican Gothic relatively recently, so I spent a good deal of What Moves the Dead, once the overall shape of the story became apparent, nodding along and waiting for the characters to catch up - it gave me a chuckle to see the reference to Mexican Gothic in the author's note.

Great writing, an intriguing reimagination of the classic.

There were a lot of scenes I loved, and the sequence in the beginning where the narrative is passed along a chain of serially coinciding characters is wonderful. When I read the reunion near the end, I literally exclaimed "Hahaha, yes!" As a whole, it felt a touch rambly, but I have no regrets. One area where Tchaikovsky excels is departing from (or maybe just ignoring?) genre tropes, and this is no exception.

There's really a lot to like here for fans of Story of Your Life/Arrival, Becky Chambers, and/or Adrian Tchaikovsky. I particularly like this take on the nearish future of technology for communication and community decision-making.

I felt like it got a bit preachy at times around the subject of distributed consensus governance, but this is a minor, subjective nitpick.

I enjoyed this one a bit more than Empress of Salt and Fortune, I think because the tension between the tellers and the listeners adds a hint of excitement that I was missing in the first one

Wholesome and cozy, with occasional interludes of surprisingly disturbing

It shouldn't be possible, after reading Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, to finish another Locked Tomb novel and yet again be like "What the hell did I just read?!" However.

Nona the Ninth is yet another wonderful, unexpected, weird masterpiece from Tamsyn Muir.

A very good continuation from The Bone Shard Daughter.

My one issue with the writing around the interpersonal interactions is that it relies heavily on the characters all assuming the worst of everything each other say and do, and refusing to communicate with each other - which is becoming the third-millennium version of "forcing characters to make irrational decisions to make the plot exciting" in my imo.