I am going to try to start at the beginning, even though I know you won’t believe me.
It’s okay. I wouldn’t believe me either. Everything I have to say sounds barking mad.
From chapter 1
Our first-person narrator, Melissa, better known to friends and family as Mouse, is a freelance editor, which Kingfisher (penname of Ursula Vernon) neatly ties into Mouse’s adventure. As the novel starts, she tells us of a phone call from her father informing her of her grandmother’s death.
This is not as bad as it might sound.
Mouse knew her grandmother and didn’t like her. No one did. Her grandmother was vicious, mean and petty. For instance, as Mouse later learns, she stole a book her second husband and Mouse’s step-grandfather, Cotgrave, valued and hid it from him. Mouse’s memories of Cotgrave are fond, if not numerous. Anyway, Grandma has left her house and belongings to Mouse’s father.
This is not as good as it might sound.
The house has little intrinsic value and Grandma was a hoarder. Isolated and backed against a dense woodland, the house is packed with boxes, some exits blocked, stairs cluttered, closets stuffed, all full of whatever she took a fancy to buy. Mouse learns this firsthand because her father is too ill to empty the house himself and asks her to do it; he wants Mouse to check out the decrepit old place and determine whether it or anything in it is worth saving, and if not, he’ll have it bulldozed and the remains carted away.
This is also not good.
One of the earliest things Mouse uncovers is her step-grandfather’s diary, which Cotgrave took pains to hide from her grandmother. The diary revolves around his imperfect memories of the stolen book, The Green Book, and the world it revealed, a world with an entrance in the surrounding woods.
And not long after, in the night, Mouse hears scrapings and bumpings and sees the eerie presence of deer.
At least, most of them seem to be deer.
After a disconcerting walk in the woods with her dog, Bongo, Cotgrave’s oblique references and obscure allusions gain a reality Mouse had not anticipated. They may give her an understanding that, however frustrating to her editorial self (and they are very frustrating), Mouse will need to interpret before that other world intrudes on her and the new friends she makes while staying in her grandmother’s house.
In The Twisted Ones, Kingfisher draws on Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” from which she retrieves both The Green Book and Cotgrave. Where Machen aimed at an elevated prose somewhere between fairy tale and weird tale, creating an eerie, ethereal tone, Kingfisher’s narrator has a decidedly contemporary and earthy tone via Mouse’s wry, self-deprecating voice, a voice that identifies her as a thoughtful daughter, a dedicated editor, and a good friend. Her decency is a takeaway of the novel as she contends with the uncanny, recognizing it as marvelous but also threatening in this entertaining, often funny, and tense supernatural thriller. Personally, I’d follow Mouse’s voice most anywhere. Her humor and Bongo’s good nature completely won me over.
THE TWISTED ONES by T. Kingfisher
(Saga Press, 2019)
416 pages
978-178 9093 285
Review by Randy Money
