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