The “fungal turn” in twenty-first-century speculative fiction has become a significant trend for narrating ecological catastrophe and the crisis of anthropocentrism, yet the ontological differences internal to fungal horror remain underexplored. Through a comparative analysis of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) and T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead (2022), this article argues that contemporary fungal fiction unfolds along divergent ontological axes: the former embeds fungi within the material legacy of colonial history; the latter envisions an ancient fungal consciousness independent of human history. Drawing on Moore’s Capitalocene, Haraway’s response-ability, Kohn’s nonhuman semiosis, and Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, this article examines the ontological status of fungi, trans-corporeal horror, and the ethical boundaries of cross-species intimacy, demonstrating that fungal destruction carries fundamentally different ethical implications depending on ontological premises. Both novels test the limits of “staying with the trouble” when faced with lethal cross-species intimacy.
Zhang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.