#T. Kingfisher

[tkingfisher]

Hey, everybody! I have a new book out today! It’s a fantasy novella called THORNHEDGE and you can pick it up wherever you get your books!*

It is very sweet and only has a few dead bodies in it and the heroine is a very anxious little were-toad.

This has been your shameless promotion for the day and I will now go back to reposting memes and interesting bug photos.

*unless, like, you only read books that are dropped in your lap by crows or slipped under your pillow by ragged claw-like hands in the night. I don’t have a distribution contract with those guys.

#ursula vernon #t. kingfisher #new book #fairy tale

[torbooks]

This advertisement is for Thornhedge—a twisted fable standalone from fantasy / horror author T. Kingfisher that’s perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and Katherine Addison. 

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

Thornhedge is Sleeping Beauty reimagined: What if the princess was awful? What if you’re a fairy guardian and really struggling with your job because your charge is a menace? This is the story of Toadling and the monster she must keep locked away.   

A towering wall of brambles and a curse have held a princess for centuries. After so much time, a gentle knight approaches, undaunted by arms-sharp thorns. He’s here to free the captive and break the curse, but lofty as these aspirations are, Toadling has no intention of allowing anyone to vanquish this spell. Walls keep things out, but also hold things in, and no one was meant to cross those thorns.

#thornhedge #t. kingfisher #ursula vernon #tor books #books #booklr #frightening fantasy #twisted fable #horror with heart #fantasy

[dduane]

YAY @tkingfisher !!! :)

#T. Kingfisher #Nettle & Bone #Hugo Awards #2023 Hugo Awards

[ashmackenzie]

Thornhedge by T.Kingfisher is out today! I made this cover that ended up getting cut before it went to print but I still like how the piece turned out and the book is great too! Many thanks to AD Peter Lutjen for taking a chance on this one!

#illustration #artists on tumblr #book cover #thornhedge #t. kingfisher #fantasy #fairytale

[petalpierrot]

#t. kingfisher #literature #eidys

[tovetar]

"He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain."

"Paladin's Grace (The Saint of Steel Book 1)" by T. Kingfisher

#knitting #hehee #t. kingfisher #quoteunquote #paladin's grace

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #12 – What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

I initially meant to read this back last year when it was up for a Hugo nomination, but well – honestly I forgot my copy in an airport waiting room and it’s presumably now living a good life somewhere in a New Jersey compose heap. But a friend had a copy and said they enjoyed it, so! Stole it for a few days, and very glad I did. It’s a quick, fun shot fungal gothic, great for stormy nights.

The basic plot is, well, it’s very explicitly Fall of the House of Usher with a slight admixture of Ruritanian Romance. The Ushers are a genteely impoverished family of minor aristocracy in Ruravia, a less than impressive principality in Eastern Europe. Alex Easton, Roderick Usher’s former commanding officer in some recent war (the Gallacian Army they served in having a habit of getting into these quite habitually) receives a letter from Roderick’s sister Madeline begging company and help, as she is deathly ill. Of course by the time Easton arrives the pair of them look like they’re one stiff wind away from dying, and the estate and the lands around it are both decaying and full of unnerving strangeness. The only person who seems happy to be there is Eugenia Potter, an Englishwoman and amateur mycologist studying the great variety of mushrooms and fungus to be found in the area.

So yes this is very much aiming to be Gothic Classic, at least in aesthetics and trappings. An overgrown and decaying estate several times too large for the last remnants of the family who now occupy it. Genteel madness and disease, hidden behind polite euphemisms and high walls. A deep, atavistic horror at parasitism and the desecration of the human (especially the well-bred, young and female) body by an alien presence. There’s even a cowboy for some reason. It definitely all works for me, but then my exposure to the genre is all a bit second hand.

Speaking of parasitism – mushrooms! The book expresses decay and desecration basically entirely through the idiom of fungal infections, both in terms of metaphor and imagery in descriptions and just in the actual source of the horror here. The lights in the tarn are fungal blooms, Madeline’s disease and her reanimation are both the result of almost drowning and inhaling that fungus into her lungs, and so on. There are two really effective horror beats in the book for me – the image of an infected hare which had just had its head shot off slowly jerking back to its feet as a dozen others placidly stood there and watched it be shot, and the moment of realization that Madeline’s oddly long and wispy body hair is in fact mycelia growing out of her skin – and both play off of this pretty directly.

I very awkwardly didn’t use any pronouns for Easton when giving the plot synopsis because the book actually plays around a bit with gender and pronouns in a way I’ve always loved and wish I saw more of. Easton is Gallacian (unrelated to the actually existing Galicia, I think), and the Gallacian language has a variety of pronoun sets beyond just he and she – one for children, one for God, and one (ka/kan) particularly for soldiers. Which, due to the exigencies of early modern warefare’s manpower requirements, eventually led to both men and women being perfectly eligible to become ‘sworn soldiers’. So y’know, Enlist today! Service guarantees citizen-transition!

(But actually I enjoy the thought and at least superficial sociological plausibility/consideration of what gender means in Gallacian society a lot more than how a lot of modern spec fic just kind of assues that every culture in the world has the perspective on gender of a well-educated 21st century progressive, material conditions be damned).

Anyway yeah, overall very entertaining read. Though Goodreads tells me it’s now the first in the series, which given how cleanly this one ended is not something that fills me with an abundance of faith.

#book review #what moves the dead #t. kingfisher #horror #sff

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Li Shimin- Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Wenren È- Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know by Cyan Wings

Renly Baratheon- A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

Doctor Piper- Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher

#Li Shimin #Iron Widow #Xiran Jay Zhao #Wenren È #Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know #dvawtk #Cyan Wings #Renly Baratheon #game of thrones #got #asoiaf #a song of ice and fire #house baratheon #George R.R. Martin #Doctor Piper #Paladin's Hope #T. Kingfisher #lgbt books #polls #queer book character tournament 2.0

[transbookoftheday]

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead is Kingfisher’s retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

#what moves the dead #t. kingfisher #nonbinary #trans book of the day #trans books #queer books #bookblr #booklr

[agardenandlibrary]

Reading again:

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

#my book picture #nettle & bone #t. kingfisher

[freckles-and-books]

I’ve been saying that T. Kingfisher is my comfort author for a while now, but I haven’t been able to fully articulate why until recently. It had something to do with her characters—that I knew. But what is it about her books that comforts me even when the books themselves are sad or scary?

While reading Thornhedge, I realized that I think it has something to do with the sense of duty Kingfisher gives her characters. Even when they are wholly unqualified to be the one doing the thing, they do it anyway because, well, someone has to, and aren’t they someone? Do her characters often wish someone would come along to take a task off their shoulders? Absolutely, but since that doesn’t happen, they do their best…even when they feel like they’re failing. And I love that sense of duty because doing good is often not easy and requires a lot of strength and perseverance, and I love seeing her characters grapple with this very human endeavor (even when they’re not fully human).

As for Thornhedge specifically, it’s short, sweet, and even a bit sad—a great fairytale retelling that I think is appropriate for readers young and old, and it encapsulates a lot of what I love about Kingfisher in general.

#thornhedge #t. kingfisher #books #fairytale retelling #sleeping beauty

[tkingfisher]

Is this a pre-order I see before me?!

It is! Coming December 5th, the fourth of the Saint of Steel books!

You can pre-order now wherever fine ebooks are sold*, and paperback orders are available from Argyll Productions! And Patreon patrons get it free, probably a few hours before midnight my time on the 4th.

This is Shane and Marguerite’s book, and it’s a chonker at 130k. There may even be a few more tidbits about the death of the god, in amid the adventure, romance, demons, and semi-accidental destabilization of the world economy!

*UK readers, you may have some glitches—OrbitUK is taking over the distribution there and we’re still ironing out transferring territorial rights—if the pre-order gets canceled, just re-order, it’s not you, it’s not even me, it’s the vast machinery of international commerce. But you also will get a snazzy paperback printing of all four books next year, which will not require ruinous shipping to the UK!

#t. kingfisher #saint of steel #new book

[torbooks]

This advertisement is for Thornhedge—a twisted fable standalone from fantasy / horror author T. Kingfisher that’s perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and Katherine Addison. 

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

Thornhedge is Sleeping Beauty reimagined: What if the princess was awful? What if you’re a fairy guardian and really struggling with your job because your charge is a menace? This is the story of Toadling and the monster she must keep locked away.   

A towering wall of brambles and a curse have held a princess for centuries. After so much time, a gentle knight approaches, undaunted by arms-sharp thorns. He’s here to free the captive and break the curse, but lofty as these aspirations are, Toadling has no intention of allowing anyone to vanquish this spell. Walls keep things out, but also hold things in, and no one was meant to cross those thorns.

#thornhedge #t. kingfisher #ursula vernon #tor books #frightening fantasy #horror with heart #twisted fable #booklr #books

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || October 28 || This Month’s Favorite:  What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

#What Moves the Dead #T. Kingfisher #justonemorepage #jompbpc #book photo challenge #book photography #books #rose's all hallows read #Not Out of Void But Out of Chaos #bpc catch up #Sworn Soldier

[gatheryepens]

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” - J.D. Salinger

#bookish #bookblr #booklr #books books books #nettle and bone #t. kingfisher #gatherreads #gatherbeingbookish

[microwave-radiation]

T. Kingfisher's romantic subplot dynamics are almost always "middle aged practical woman with a major failed relationship in her past meets buff polite guilt-riddled hunk of a man", and ya know what I respect that

#t. kingfisher #t kingfisher #ursula vernon #swordheart #clockwork boys #microwave-radiation