You've Got Five Pages, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, To Tell Me You're Good.

The first chapter can make or break a reader's engagement with a story. We as writers must craft brilliant opening pages in order to hook those picky readers, so let's study the stories of others to see how they do it!  This is hands down one of my favorite finds so far for this podcast. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher may be a reimagining of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, but in five pages it still reads very much as its own unique work. I'm reminded a bit of John Scalzi's Kaiju Preservation Society as far as the wry narrator goes, and of Jeff VanderMeer's Area X trilogy with the unsettling, unnatural forms Nature seems to take. Everything is bleak and grotesque--even the sight of mushrooms growing hints at violent death for humanity. Setting this grim landscape inside a fictional country also makes the story feel like it's one step off kilter from reality--it could be in our Europe, but surely not, right? This book moves at a quick clip, so if you'd like to take a few days to shift into some spookier tales for the coming Halloween season, I can't think of a better place to start.  What will you make of these first five pages? Let's find out!