Sometimes a book just grabs you and won’t let go. It sinks its hooks into you, draws blood, elicits uncontrollable chills, and simply infects you. The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon), is such a novel.
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods in this chilling novel that reads like The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show.
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones is a gripping, terrifying tale bound to keep you up all night—from both fear and anticipation of what happens next.
The novel begins simply enough, a woman named Melissa, whose friends call Mouse, is asked by her ailing father to clear out her recently deceased grandmother’s house in North Carolina. Upon Mouse’s arrival wit her hound dog Bongo, Mouse realizes the house is in the middle of nowhere, very near a thickly wooded area, and that her grandmother was a hoarder. Mouse’s memories of her grandmother are far from positive, Grandma was always mean and nasty to everybody she encountered and never had a kind word for anybody in her family.
The barebones setting is creepy enough – a remote location near the woods with limited connection to the outside world. Add the strange shadows from the piles of newspapers and other assorted junk in the house and the creepy level increases. One of the rooms is filled with china baby dolls, which I’ve always found to be creepy, which is enhanced by Kingfisher’s wonderful description of what Mouse sees. As Mouse continues to make her way through the house, she finds strange notes left behind by her Grandfather-in-Law that alludes to strange creatures and peculiar goings-on in the woods and increasingly unsettling notes that allude to a Green Book. As mentioned earlier, Mouse’s grandmother was not a nice person, so of course she hid the Green Book from him. Mouse is an editor by trade, so that provides another interesting layer to her consumption of her grandfather’s words.
There’s a rhythm to the notes Mouse is reading, repeated phrases, which give a greater sense of unease. That unease is amplified by strange noises at night that may be getting very close to the house. Mouse befriends the neighboring family, who confirm a few things for Mouse and give her some needed support as she’s uncovering mysteries about her grandfather and his connection to the woods and what may be inhabiting those words. Chief among that family of neighbors is their de facto matriarch, Foxy. Foxy acts like the mother who Mouse is missing in her life and helps Mouse in more ways than Mouse could have ever hoped for.
As I was reading the book and hearing Mouse’s voice, she quickly rose up the list of my favorite first-person narrators. She’s smart, genre savvy (for lack of a better term), loves her dog, snarky, and overall just a really cool person. I’d like to think she and I would be friends…which isn’t a bad quality for a protagonist. Bongo he provides support to Mouse and helps to give her strength. In other words, he’s a good boy. Foxy is more than just a supporting character, the kind of folksy neighbor we all wish we had living next door.
What Mouse discovers in the woods, the things that come to her house, are nightmare fuel. Ticking and tocking, clacking, shambling things that are described perfectly. Once Mouse inevitably enters the woods, it is a tour of the haunted forest that resonates with the things we expect to encounter in the creepy woods, but told in a refreshingly frightening fashion. It is a journey into the darkness that is nearly impossible to disentangle yourself from partaking.
2019 has been a superb year of horror fiction from what I’ve read and The Twisted Ones is perhaps the creepiest, most terrifying novel of the year. A surefire best of the year, regardless of genre and an instant classic of the genre. Hell, one of the few novels I’ve ever read (the others being King’s The Shining and Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night) to give me chills make the skin on the back of my neck crawl as I was reading them. A powerful masterwork.
I didn’t realize until finishing the novel that the novel was an ode/response of sorts to Arthur Machen’s early 20th Century story “The White People.” This novel will probably work on a different level for people familiar with that story. I didn’t have much familiarity with it and The Twisted Ones worked perfectly for me. Also, T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym for Ursula Vernon.
Highly Recommended
© 2019 Rob H. Bedford
Saga Press | October 2019
Hardcover | 385 pages
http://www.redwombatstudio.com
http://www.redwombatstudio.com/portfolio/writing/books-for-adults/the-twisted-ones/
Review copy purchased
