#idk like i'm not out here asking for IT or insomnia or the terror length books here

[bereft-of-frogs]

I just finished T Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, and I gotta say, bold move to be like ‘this book is specifically to deep dive into The Fall of the House of Usher because Poe’s short story doesn’t go into details’ only to add like 4 things on top of it - including three additional characters, an entire subgenre, and a fictional society with seven sets of invented pronouns (which also aren’t used very often, since the whole thing is in first person, so it’s hard to get used to and by halfway through I was still having to map sentences in dialogue to figure out who was being talked about) - and barely make it any longer.

Ok that’s unfair because it is quite a bit longer than the original short story, but still I don’t think it was long enough to justify all the additions. Like it could have been a deep dive (as stated in the author’s note) in the length it is or it could have all these additions and be a hundred pages longer, but it didn’t quite all fit into the 160 pages.

It was still significantly better -- by a long mile, like it was good even if I had some issues with it -- than the other two popular short booktok horror books I’ve read recently, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Nothing But Blackened Teeth, both of which have a similar vibe and that vibe is ‘this is a short film I’m turning in to film school as my final project/sending around to the short film circuits while I get funding and develop the feature’ which is unfortunate because that’s not really how book publishing works?

Or I mean, I guess it can be, there are novels that start out as short stories, and other things like when someone writes a piece of fanfiction and then later adapts it into a full-length original work, or what we’re seeing with people self-publishing novels that then get picked up by major publishers and go through another round of edits....but in terms of like ‘I wrote this novella now I’m going to work on it more and publish the full version’ like...no that just makes the novella feel like a rough draft.