I love a book club where you leave thinking a book is better or worse than you did when you entered.

What Moves The Dead is simple and fun. It's not that creepy, not that gothic. There are so, so many simple ways that it could have been a lot better. But did it need to be? No.

Before I'd talked about it, this book was a generous four star read for me. It didn't pull me back when I put it down and the main character was dull. The ending was short and simple, and well - also a little dull. As a book, I didn't expect anything great from it and I got exactly what I thought I'd get. I loved the setting and the idea behind it but didn't know that it was heavily based on an Edgar Allen Poe short story when I was reading it, so perhaps it was this hat carried the bits I liked.

This said, the more you actually think about this book, the more frustrating it becomes. There really didn't need to be many additional characters. The nice neat ending doesn't actually wrap up the mystery but no one in the story seems to give a damn with it just becoming another loose thread. At times it's contradictory on key points and though a large (boring) portion at the beginning revolves around Alex's army past and how the army deals with pronouns, this information has no  relation to anything actually going on.

On one hand, a book with a non-binary main character gives representation where there often isn't any. Yes, there's the long explanation about people who join the army taking non-gendered pronouns but that could have been summed up in a sentence. But one could argue that's still representation I suppose. On the other hand, Alex isn't really portrayed as a non-binary character in the book. After all that introduction to new pronouns, they don't actually use them.

Also, you can definitely tell that T.Kingfisher is a children's book author as this reads more like a YA book than one aimed at grown-ups.

Maybe I've just thought about the book too hard now so I'll stay at my original, pre-book club ⭐⭐⭐⭐.