What Feasts at Night

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. (Feb.)