Things that are creepy:
- hares walking funny even after you've shot them in the head because they're possessed by mushrooms
- analogous things happening to humans
- the implication that soon it'll happen to you

Since reading Merlin Sheldrake's incredible book about fungi, I've been paying extra attention to mushrooms of all kind. Closer to animals than plants, they truly lend themselves fantastically to horror. With the amount of fungal imagery in the original Fall of the House of Usher, bringing them in was an excellent choice.

But then there were all the things that didn't work, which is bound to happen with certain retellings. I was painfully frustrated with all the characters and especially our narrator, Alex Easton, whose voice felt anachronistic and wrong on so many levels. It was next to impossible to assess the level of actual friendship or past history between the characters, who were somehow meant to be childhood friends and war buddies but were all painfully removed and hollow.

It's disingenuous to write this review to comment on the amount of real estate that was taken for unrelated world building around our narrators fictional country. The pronoun system, military culture, and other social structures were shoehorned in between unrelated narrative moments that I wish had been devoted to developing the horror or the characters of Madeleine and Rodrick. The world building was clearly there to set the stage for a sequel but, in the context of the stand alone novel, was a frustrating distraction.

Between all this, I didn't really care about the plot. And as other low rated reviews have said, that's a good thing since there wasn't much there. The narrative tension was unconvincing, the intended mystery was obvious, and I just wanted to put the book down or finally get it over with.

As such, other than a few well crafted creepy scenes, I i was just left frustrated with this book. 1.5 stars rounded down.