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Book Review: The Twisted Ones, by T. Kingfisher

I purchased a copy of T. Kingfisher‘s The Twisted Ones.

the twisted ones cover

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.

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.

my review

Honestly, horror isn’t a genre I gravitate toward. But I’ve loved everything I’ve read by T. Kingfisher. So, I thought, why not try her horror books? I enjoyed it well enough. It has the creepy factor, if not the terror. I liked Mouse and the side characters; there’s some tongue-in-cheek humor, and the story kept me interested. There’s not a lot more that I require from a book.

If I had to critique, it would be that Mouse’s willingness to sacrifice for her dog is excessive. I love my dogs about as much as anyone, but a bit too much of the plot of The Twisted Ones depends on Mouse’s easy willingness to endanger herself for her pet. The ending also seems to abandon the creepy, folk horror atmosphere in favor of a more direct fear. But I would have preferred the book to carry through with the creepy plotting.

All in all, however, I enjoyed this about as much as I could expect to enjoy a horror book.

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Other Reviews:

Book Review | The Twisted Ones

Book Review of HALO: Smoke and Shadow, by Kelly Gay

I won a paperback copy of Kelly Gay‘s contribution to the Halo universe, Smoke and Shadow.

Description from Goodreads:

Find. Claim. Profit. In a post-war galaxy littered with scrap, it’s the salvager’s motto. And with a fast ship and a lust for adventure, Rion Forge has certainly made her mark on the trade. When the discovery of a wrecked UNSC cruiser brings Rion’s past back to haunt her, stirring fresh hope into a decades-old wound, she’s hell-bent on finding answers: What really happened to her father and his ship, the Spirit of Fire?

Review:

As I said, I won this book through a giveaway and, having not read any of the previous 18 books or ever played the game, I was really going in blind with reading it. But I was able to follow it without problem and it was engaging enough. I felt it would have been better suited for a full-length novel than the novella it is. It could have done with the room to flesh it out. And there is a bit of predictable tragedy I’d have preferred to do without. But all in all, I’d be willing to read the next book in Gay’s arc of the Halo franchise. (However, having just read a review of HALO: Renegades with some pretty major spoilers in it, I guess I don’t need to. To be fair the reviewer was pointing out the events of other books in the universe that functioned as spoilers to Renegades, but having not read those other books it was their review that was the spoiler.)