The Twisted Ones (2019)
Written by: T. Kingfisher Genre: Horror Pages: 381 (Paperback)
Publisher: Saga Press
Why I Chose It: The Twisted Ones first caught my attention because it is set in Appalachia. Although I live in Virginia and the book takes place in North Carolina, I have gone hiking on the Appalachian Trail. I know those woods can be spooky. When I saw The Twisted Ones billed as the scariest book of the year, I knew I had to read it.
The Premise:
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.
No Spoilers.
Discussion: This is a legitimately creepy book. I never thought of a hoarder house as a frightening place but the rooms jam-packed with junk gave a sense of claustrophobia that — combined with the isolated location — made me uneasy even before anything weird happened. Even worse, Mouse’s grandmother collected dolls. I’m glad that Kingfisher agrees with me that dolls are disturbing and those ultra-realistic newborn baby dolls look dead. “The whole damn room was full of dead babies…It looked like a monument to infanticide, and also to the astonishing holding capacity of clear plastic bins” (p.22). I also had an elderly relative with an enormous assortment of dolls, and it completely freaked me out. I’d rather sleep in a room with a tarantula collection.
As Mouse is cleaning, she finds her step-grandfather Cotgrave’s journal, which contains the bizarre recitation “I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones” (p. 39). He also writes about a mysterious Green Book, the white ones in the woods, and his terrible marriage to Mouse’s cruel grandmother. At first, Mouse assume that he was suffering from dementia but when she takes her dumb-as-a-brick dog, Bongo, for a walk in the woods, she realizes that Cotgrave was not losing his mind.
The Twisted Ones is a book with many great details and a sense of humor. Mouse remembers a time when her grandmother was mean to her and Cotgrave taught her how to draw Kilroy. “Thirty-odd years later, I looked down at the drawing in the journal and sighed. He’d been talking about being a soldier in the war. I hadn’t known that then.” (p.43). Mouse describes her hippie neighbor, Foxy, as looking like “a cross between a drag queen and a wildflower meadow” (p. 97). Kingfisher also does an excellent job explaining why Mouse violates every horror cliché and continues to stay at the house. At first, she doesn’t want to leave because she is a book editor and she wants to find Cotgrave’s strange Green Book. Then she stays because Bongo gets loose and she can’t bear to leave without her dog. Finally, Mouse goes back in the creepy woods because she believes that someone needs her help and she is too compassionate to walk away. I admired her as I screamed at her not to go.
Only a few things frustrated me about this book. I did wish that Kingfisher had done more with the Appalachian setting. The woods were sinister but they might as well have been located in Oregon or California because there weren’t any unique details. The woods should have felt familiar to me, but they didn’t. I also expected more Appalachian history. As much as I liked Foxy and the other neighbors from the commune, the story got less frightening when they came in. It broke the narrative tension when Mouse told them about the weird things that happened and they said, “Oops, we thought you already knew there was something wrong about the woods here.” It would have much scarier if Mouse had to face those woods alone. I do have to commend Foxy for being an incredible neighbor. I think of a favor between neighbors as borrowing a cup of sugar or asking to use the phone when you get locked out. I am definitely not accompanying any of my neighbors into any evil woods.
In conclusion: While I was reading The Twisted Ones, I dreamed that I witnessed a murder on the local greenway where I walk my dog. When I woke up, I thought the dream was real, and that I needed to go hide the murder evidence. I was disappointed because it was my day off, and I had other things I wanted to do. Apparently, I’m a terrible person who doesn’t want to deal with a murder if I was already planning to go to the bookstore that day. The Twisted Ones isn’t the scariest book I’ve ever read (still The Deep by Nick Cutter, which I do not recommend) but I can’t argue with a horror book that literally gave me a nightmare.
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