The Twisted Ones

Things I did after reading this book:
1. Gathered all the plastic shopping bags up and put them in the car to recycle
2. Threw out the broken toaster
3. Ordered a motion-sensitive light for the back of the house
4. Talked myself out of putting the mattress over the window
5. Moved the deer skull to the back of the linen closet, behind the winter comforter (don't judge; it was a gift from a friend)
6. Turned on all the lights before I went to bed

This book is the sort of horror that slides under your skin with its sheer mundanity, until you're over the threshold of oddity, into unsettling creepiness and then life-threatening peril. Kingfisher's writing manages to be both clear and straightforward and also a tool that reveals character and establishes a sense of place without apparent effort. And the dog lives.

One unusual thing this book does is reassure us right from the start that Mouse and Bongo will come out of things alive. This is really odd for a horror story, but it in no way reduces the adrenaline rush of things, and it’s nice to know in advance that the dog won’t die.

The “found manuscript” angle is handled very well. The book itself is a manuscript typed up by Mouse. She early on finds Cotgrave’s diary, which references a manuscript that he has typed up. That manuscript is an attempt to reconstruct a missing diary called the Green Book, that tells of a girl’s experiences with the odd white people. Each layer adds doubt and uncertainty, and I like that Cotgrave has to fill in a lot of blanks where he doesn’t exactly remember what the Green Book said.

Given that we know from the start that Mouse and Bongo survive, I was concerned as to whether or not the story would be able to stand up on matters of tension. I shouldn’t have worried! It took me about an hour after finishing the book to come down off of the adrenaline high. I’ve been reading horror for decades, so that doesn’t happen very often! Things are tense, exciting, concerning, creepy, and utterly bizarre. The pacing is wonderful too–things get weirder and weirder as the book goes on.

I absolutely recommend that you pick this up. If you’re already a fan of Kingfisher and wondering how this holds up, it’s every bit as good as her other books, just heavier on the horror!

Wow. I think the moral of this story is, if someone asks you to clean out the house of a deceased relative, say no and keep your peace of mind.

Mouse, unfortunately for her, does not say no. Her father asks for so little, so when he asked Mouse to clean out his mother's house, she agrees, even though it is commonly agreed that the old lady was meaner than a pit of agitated rattlesnakes. Then to find Granny was a hoarder - even if there had been no fantasy element in this book, that alone would make it a horror novel.

With just her beloved coonhound for company, Mouse sets to work. Creepy things happen. She makes friends with the suspected hippies across the street. More creepy things happen, but as long as Bongo, her hound is okay, she'll be okay.

What I like most about Kingfisher's novels is her authorial voice. No matter what she throws at me in the way of plot or setting or secondary characters, I believe her because her POV character is always so grounded and down-to-earth. Her narrators are so real that I will follow her anywhere. (Okay, she's on my list of authors whom I buy all their books.)

In her afterword, she mentions the inspiration for this, Arthur Machen's "The White People." I was not familiar with either Machen or this story, but it didn't matter. (I am familiar with H.P. Lovecraft and his views, so I chuckled at her "Well, Lovecraft, bless his heart (that is a *Southern* bless his heart....)" Oh, yes, the substitution of "bless his heart" for the curse word you actually have in mind.)

So, it's October. Want to read something spooky? Try this!

Warning: this review contains footnotes* but no spoilers. It’s also long, which is what happens when a book really annoys me, I have to get it out somehow!

1. Put the book down and go read Arthur Machen’s “The White People.” (No, it’s not a Klan polemic, promise.) Despite the praise of critics from Lovecraft on down, I find Machen generally, and The White People particularly, to be a bit of a slog. Still, I feel like this author should have, I don’t know, put it in an appendix or something; it’s public domain after all, and god knows it’s better than this mess.

2. You MUST like dogs, and have known a dog well, to enjoy this book. I mean... There’s a lot of dog. And I like dogs. But the dog is a major and boring character. (You know, Dean Koontz does this too, but at least his dogs are magical psychic familiars with extraordinary telepathic and empathic powers. Which is annoying in its own way, but at least the dogs feel like characters as opposed to plot devices put there to move the narrator here to there, or provide dues-ex-machina motivations for the narrator to do dumb things.)

3. Speaking of Machen: it’s just unclear to me what the author was trying to do with The White People. Homage? Update (“Machen, but with sassy chicks”)? I mean, it’s not the same story really, but huge chunks of Machen are literally copypasta’ed in. Maybe it’s an attempt to build a new, Lovecraft-free Machen mythos—I could get behind that if there weren’t already lots of people working with Machen in a less ham-fisted sort of way. Just, the literally constant references don’t do much except make you have to go reread The White People and then wonder why you did.
4. Relatedly: The narrators flippant tone** is a little at odds with the supposed creep factor.***Not sure the two work together. (I admit, when writing this particular bullet point**** I am only 33 percent finished with supposedly 2 hrs 41 minutes to go.***** )

5. I guess.... I’m just not sure this author is Really Down with the whole weird fiction thing, you know? Like—she started reading Machen and liked it and that felt like a surprise to her (maybe even had the frisson of the (academically) illicit)? One does not get the feeling she’s been steeped in the occult. The tone is far too.... sunny, even the light cynicism running throughout. It’s a bit like if The White People was animated by Disney, when Walt was still in charge (think Fantasia). The creatures are just too... material somehow. Everything is too... literal. (I could be completely wrong about all this and our author is a proud practitioner of chaos magic, plant alchemy, and tantric sex, and hangs out with S.T. Joshi every weekend. BUT... I doubt it.)

6. I’ll give her this. The narrator’s claim to botanical knowledge is completely plausible: at one point she says “sedges have edges”!! Wow. Only a real plant person would know that mnemonic.******

7. The character Foxy is pretty broadly drawn for a major character. It’s like the author’s never been to Baltimore, if she thinks THIS lady is super eccentric.

8. Oh man it drags at the end.

*Hell, the narrator of specifically says “footnotes are your friend” so no apologies here.

**Weirdly, the narrator reminds me most of Kinsey Millhone, that snappy, man-independent (yet determinedly psychosexually healthy!) detective from those alphabet mysteries. This is not an insult—I read every one up to V—but nor is it a ringing endorsement. Kinsey Millhone always seemed a little too... simultaneously overconfident and underdressed. I always found myself wondering, “but is she HOT?” Clearly, I’ve absorbed a patriarchal mindset despite my so called feminism. (Or maybe, white, middle-class, mid-thirties , single-by-choice women all get written this way since second-wave-feminism? Come to think of it... There was something banal and unconvincing about my ownself in my mid-thirties.)

*** The creep factor, sad to say, is not high. I am under the impression the author here is a pseudonym for some other author, who is presumably not a “genre” author, else why be pseudonymous at all? (Either the worst or best thing that ever happened to horror/weird/dark fiction was its segregation from the “regular” books at your average bookstore. Back when those were a thing. Lol sad not sad.)
...anyway, maybe it’s hard to shift into the insidious mindset needed to write The Weird if you’re otherwise busy trying to get some respect in the godawful abomination that is literary fiction since 1985 or so.

**** yes, not a bullet point but item in an ordered list, whatever, but please note this review is just a series of jottings made while reading and were written in an order not reflected in the ordering of the review as it is here, post-copypasta. Hard to believe given its coherence, I know.

***** How is this calculated? Is it real-time, like your cars mpg? Or just some random average not based on you at all?

****** Who but a plant person cares, after all? Unfortunately, “Sedges have edges” is NOT followed by any helpful information about the grasses with whom they are often confused. I guess because “and grasses are round” doesn’t rhyme? (Also, “And grasses have asses” is not, botanically speaking, true, fortunately.)
Side note: if this author is, indeed, some sort of literary fiction writer in her other life, I’m 95 percent sure she pointedly uses the full names of plants at least once per unit-of-literary-output. If you’re a woman who wants to be taken seriously as a writer of fiction or poetry (and thereby get tenure) you’d best be knowing some good-sounding plant names!

This is one hell of a creepshow. The author is well known for her writing of realistic characters and her own hound is brought to (flatulent) life in the pages. It does start slow but naturally, building tension gradually until the frickinfrackin window scene. Trust me. This book is delightfully creepy and I may never trust anything deer-shaped ever again.

Or woodpeckers in the woods.

Clak clak.

How in the world do you manage to work a jump scare into a BOOK? How??

I'm not sure, but T. Kingfisher/ Ursula Vernon has done it.

The Twisted Ones is quietly horrifying, deeply disturbing, and at times outright terrifying. Kingfisher has built a normal, relatable world that anyone could find themselves in-- right up until she leaves it for something worse. I tried to put this book down a few times, and was visibly irritated on one occasion when I was forced to stop reading it, because the delicious tension makes you want to know what is behind the next page, through the next door, and just behind the next tree. The Twisted Ones is addictive and wonderfully written.

I've seen a lot of discussion about whether this is a horror novel in the truest sense. Depending on what part of the book you're in, the answer is an unequivocal "yes". Other parts are more strongly fantasy or Southern Gothic, and all these disparate elements sometimes layer like a parfait rather than blend like a stew. No matter what you're looking for, the end result is still delicious and I very much hope Kingfisher revisits this world again soon.

This is somehow not horror, and also more robustly and comprehensively terrifying than any of the horror I’ve read. The protagonist is just a person - no super powers, no mystical stuff - who finds herself in a situation that is increasingly unmanageable and frightening as her understanding increases, while never becoming complete. The writing is seductive in that way of an entirely credible, particularly charming and likeable neighbor who is putting herself out, very gently and fondly, to tell you about a difficult time in her life and it just carries the reader along into a plethora of nightmare scenarios. This is a great book and I’m just sad it’s quite probably too scary for me to read again for a long long time.

Before I purchased this book I read the reviews and thought it's up my alley. I enjoy a scary, edge of your seat thriller. Sadly I was disappointed. While the story is ho hum, I found it to be ridiculous and unbelievable. Others enjoyed this book and I'm glad they did. For me it fell short of my expectations.

Starting off, the main character is really annoying. I need to consistently remind myself that she is supposed to be mid 30s. She reminds me more of a young 20s. I’m also annoyed with her assuming everyone is racist. The only person she didn’t assume was racist was The Goth girl, but it took her forever to learn that girl’s name... seems super self absorbed. Oh you just assume the southern cop is racist and completely against the hippies across the street, because, you know, white, southern cop. Then when he says, yeah they’re sweet people, no apology for a rude, uncalled-for assumption? 150 pages in and she has already assumed racism about 59 times.

The writing is so beautiful! But the flow of the book is super choppy. The dog’s character is 100% the driving force of the novel. Nothing would have happened if it wasn’t for Bongo doing this or doing that.

Speaking of the dog. I have never had the experience of a dog running away, so maybe I’m wrong here, but my acceptance of this book was completely shattered when she fell off the porch, letting go of the leash, and losing her dog. Then followed this up by sitting on the porch sipping lemonade with her neighbor. I skipped a few sentences about her calling around to dog pounds and drinking coffee... but seriously! I would be out of my mind if my dog ran off! Definitely not sitting around drinking lemonade.

I’m about 1/2 way through and am still waiting for the scare to start. Will update if I find it.

This started out promising but really didn’t deliver. It’s funny at times (which is enjoyable) but when you’re cracking jokes while a monster is peeking in your window... you really, really take the scare-steam out of a moment. And that happens a LOT in this book. It’s like the author has no idea how to build and sustain tension. It’s also told in the past tense which adds another element of separation from the action and it doesn’t work.
The plot was also kind of lame. Unless you like reading about cleaning out junk and what an old man remembers from a book that went missing.
The best parts were the moments between the MC and her dog. Very relatable.