“The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera.”

The first sentence of the book immediately establishes the dark mood that pervades What Moves the Dead just as the fungus invades the landscape. In this passage, T. Kingfisher uses a metaphor to compare a mushroom to deceased flesh and muscle, implicitly introducing the relationship between fungi and death and foreshadowing the presence of the intelligent but deadly fungus that will eventually be revealed in the climax of the story.

“The house of Usher had dozens of eyes, so either it was a great many faces lined up together or it was the face of some creature belonging to a different order of life—a spider, perhaps, with rows of eyes along its head.”

Alex describes the house as ominous and almost alien, comparing the windows in the house to arachnid eyes. The novella thus mirrors the Gothic style of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe. Gothic fiction is known for incorporating ominous, grotesque settings and quasi-supernatural elements. By personifying the house and portraying the windows as eyes, Kingfisher also suggests that the house is alive, indirectly developing the theme of Mycology and the Possibility of Intelligent Fungi. The description of the house implies that it has been taken over by fungi and is therefore alive in that sense.