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.
400 pages
Published October 1, 2019
I spent an afternoon in the library one day, waiting for a ride home after a doctor’s appointment, and to pass the time, I sat reading T Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones. It turned out to be the best decision I’d made all day.
Mouse is tasked with cleaning out her deceased grandmother’s house, discovering not only that grandma was a hoarder in her elder years, but also that there are mysterious and deeply creepy things happening in the area. Things that can’t be explained rationally, and that don’t always have explanations or answers at the end.
The lack of answers made The Twisted Ones even more compelling, in my mind.
I’ve read a couple of things by Kingfisher before, but The Twisted Ones resonated in a way I didn’t expect. Not necessarily with characters I related to or settings I was familiar with, but by plucking a chord of disturbance in me, one which kept me hooked for the whole reading experience. Watching Mouse struggle not only with the relative mundanity of cleaning a house and coping with family issues, but with the supernatural elements that keep forcing their way into her life. A mysterious journal left by her grandfather, a desolate hill in the woods that keeps appearing and disappearing, and what feels an awful lot like dark faerie lore meets Southern gothic. There’s so much to unpack that trying to write this review feels awkward, like I’m not doing a proper job of explaining just how fantastic and dark and creepy The Twisted Ones was.
…and I made faces like the faces in the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones…
Even before all the truly terrifying things happened, Kingfisher builds a tense atmosphere with small explained incidents. The house she’s cleaning, packed with years and years of hoarded items, feels suffocating and oppressive, like wherever you go within it is just going to be as bad as the last room. No escape, no reprieve, and yet it’s where Mouse is stuck. Then you throw in Mouse seeing glimpses of something in the woods, or the figure peeking through the window, or the way voices and urges keep popping into her head, slowly ramps up the terror. The best analogy I can come up with is how you can be in a bath that’s slowly getting warmer, and you don’t always notice how hot it’s gotten until it’s too hot. The horror in The Twisted Ones is a bit like that. The small creeps add up until everything fits together and you find yourself, and the characters, running for their lives, terrified of what they know is behind them, and also what might be behind them.
I mentioned earlier that there are things in this novel that go unexplained by the end, and while that can be a turn-off for some readers (and I absolutely understand why), I think it worked well here. We learned everything that Mouse learned, and in the end she was more interested in fleeing for her life and getting to safety than she was in sticking around and trying to dig up lore about beings that may have originated across the ocean, and who were trying to kill her besides! I wouldn’t stick around either, no matter how curious I was. So while there are a few things I can infer, readers don’t get a concrete explanation of everything that led to the events of The Twisted Ones. I can see how that would leave some people disappointed, but for my part, I thought it fit well.
There was an author note included at the back of the book which talked about Kingfisher’s inspiration, a short story by Welsh author Arthur Machen, titled The White People (which I haven’t read, but now very much want to). It, too, apparently ends without a conclusive explanation for everything that happened, making The Twisted Ones a great reflection of the source material.
Despite the high creep factor and the tense atmosphere, The Twisted Ones is a book I want to reread at some point in the future. Probably after reading The White People, to gain better context. Since it’s a novel that builds its mystery piece by piece, layer by layer, that makes it an excellent candidate for a re-read, to see what ends up having greater significance early on, after knowing how it all ends. Also it was just a damn good book; I have yet to read anything that T Kingfisher has written that I haven’t deeply enjoyed. Even if it scares the pants off me!
The characters were a joy to follow (Mouse’s narrative voice was great, Foxy had a truly wicked sense of humour and personality, and Bongo is a doofy lovable dog who, yes, survives the horrific events he and his human were subjected to), the setting was strange and compelling, and Kingfisher’s writing style made The Twisted Ones a spine-tingling page-turner that deserves a spot on the bookshelves of everyone who loves horror and folklore.
No comments:
Post a Comment