What Feasts at Night

The opening chapters of What Feasts at Night establish Gallacia as both a physical landscape and an emotional terrain, grounding the novella in a distinctly Gothic atmosphere while setting the stage for the story’s deeper themes of trauma, folklore, and caretaking. The very first line—“the woods of Gallacia are as deep and dark as God’s sorrow” (1)—acts almost as an epigraph, framing the countryside as an ancient, melancholic place. Kingfisher’s sensory descriptions further intensify this mood, reinforcing Gallacia’s persistent bleakness by framing the woods as a “giant throat,” the silence as “thick” and almost tactile, and the villages as “mostly gray” (6). This environmental heaviness foreshadows both the supernatural threat of the moroi and the psychological burden that Easton carries into the story. By contrasting Gallacia with Paris—the “city of my heart” (3)—Kingfisher underscores the dissonance between modern, rationalist spaces and the folkloric, half-forgotten world that Easton has returned to, setting up The Tension between Folk Belief and Rational Inquiry.

Easton’s narrative voice contributes substantially to this tonal layering. Ka frequently breaks the fourth wall, as when ka notes, “You may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling” (23). This direct address creates a modern tone of conversational intimacy while simultaneously echoing classic Gothic narrators who justify their anxieties to imagined readers. Kingfisher uses humor—often dry, self-deprecating, or sarcastic—to temper the dread embedded in the setting. Wry lines such as “We traveled from smell to smell” (5) or “Gallacia has natural springs the way that dogs have fleas” (9) balance the encroaching horror with levity, establishing a tone that is both literary and casual.

These early chapters are also instrumental in establishing the characters’ key traits and quirks. Angus, who has served Easton since ka was a teenager, embodies steadfast practicality. Described as “batman” as well as “valet, groom, and voice of reason” (2), Angus grounds the narrative with unflappable competence. His repertoire of meaningful grunts—such as the one Easton identifies as his “‘thinking’ grunt” (17)—illustrates the deep familiarity and mutual caretaking between the two. This relationship introduces the novella’s focus on Caretaking and Camaraderie as Countermeasures to Dread, a concept that becomes increasingly important as the story juxtaposes community support with the isolation of the treacherous setting.

Miss Potter’s reintroduction explicitly connects the novella to What Moves the Dead, reinforcing continuity in Kingfisher’s developing character networks and thematic concerns. For example, Easton notes that Miss Potter had “saved the world” (2) from fungal horrors at the Ushers’ lake, anchoring the new narrative in the earlier book’s blend of body horror and scientific investigation. Miss Potter stands as an avatar of rational, empirical inquiry, and her presence foregrounds the novella’s developing dialogue between scientific knowledge and Gallacian superstition.

Kingfisher also intertwines these character dynamics with early manifestations of The Tangible Nature of Trauma, a dynamic that is most prominently demonstrated through Easton’s tinnitus. When ka is cleaning the springhouse, for example, the tinnitus “[comes] roaring in” (10), triggering a visceral flashback; in this moment, ka becomes briefly convinced that Bulgarian soldiers are approaching and swings a bucket at “[n]othing.” These episodes collapse time, allowing the war—what Easton later calls a “place” rather than an event—to intrude upon kan present reality. Easton’s reference to “soldier’s heart” captures the idea that the body reacts to stress as if it is under fire. As ka states, “fungus or cannon fire, it’s all just the war” (11). Trauma thus becomes a lens through which Easton both perceives Gallacia and intuits the supernatural threat that will emerge later. The lodge itself amplifies this effect. Once a childhood place preserved in memory, it now appears “fixed […] in childhood and perhaps not updated regularly since” (15). This destabilizing dissonance between memory and reality leaves Easton vulnerable to fear, nostalgia, and dread.

Kingfisher weaves elements of foreshadowing quietly but persistently through these chapters, and even subtle details such as the uneasy silence of the woods, the sensation of being watched, and the oppressive atmosphere in the lodge hint at the presence of a malevolent, unseen force. When the characters report feeling “very small, like a mouse […] while something huge walked overhead” (21), this passage is a prime example of Kingfisher’s penchant for blending psychological unease with traditional Gothic elements. This pattern is further reinforced by the setting’s creaking structures, eerie natural phenomena, and sense of ancestral haunting. Yet because these elements are also grounded in Easton’s trauma responses, an overarching tone of ambiguity arises, and it remains unclear whether something supernatural is stalking Easton, or whether kan trauma is shaping kan perceptions of the landscape.

These opening chapters blend humor, dread, intimacy, and introspection to introduce the novella’s central tensions, and the setting behaves almost as a character in and of itself: moody, watchful, and burdened with history. Likewise, Easton’s narrative voice is both modern and Gothic, allowing the author to play with genre conventions while boldly reimagining them. These chapters thus lay the groundwork for the conflict between superstition and rationality, the lingering weight of war trauma, and the role that caretaking relationships can play in the struggle to navigate the sensation of dread. As the narrative progresses, these threads will deepen and intertwine, shaping the emotional and thematic arc of the story.