'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.'
Okay, first thing first, if you're in self isolation and want to read this book you should definitely do that, however, if you're doing so in a building that's surrounded by woodlands, maybe give it a miss for a while.
The Twisted Ones is easily one of the creepiest books I've read in a very long time. It follows Melissa, a competent and level headed woman who's roped into clearing out her recently deceased grandmother's house out in the woods of North Carolina. She agrees to do this to help out her ageing and ill father, and to get back a bit at her grandmother, who she assures the reader many times was a bit of a horrible person. The fact that everyone who Melissa meets during her stay thinks the same thing about her grandmother helps make every grumble and bad word said about her feel earned.
The biggest problem that Melissa finds upon arriving, however, is that her grandmother was something of a hoarder. The house is filled with stacks of old papers, boxes of junk, and there's even a room dedicated to creepy dolls; a room that Melissa justly nicknames the 'dead baby room'. Despite having to face the massive mounds of junk and dozens of trips back and forth to the local dump she actually gets on with it well, enjoying spending time with her faithful dog Bongo, and making friends with the motley assortment of neighbours living on an old hippie commune across the road.
Things take a turn, however, when she discovers a strange hill when out walking Bongo, a treeless mound that shouldn't be there. There's also the strange rock carvings that dot the hill, ones that seem to get into her head and mess with her, that add to the bizarreness. When Melissa uncovers a journal kept by her step-grandfather, talking about the strange people in the hill, she begins to think that there may be something even stranger going on. Who are these 'twisted ones' he keeps writing about, are they connected to the strange carvings, and who made the gruesome effigy out of a dead deer in the woods behind the house?
I enjoyed what Kingfisher (the pen name of Ursula Vernon) does with this book. She takes the time to build up Melissa and her task of clearing out her grandmother's house before anything weird or creepy actually happens. She writes the book from Melissa's point of view, and thanks to the casual, somewhat conversational nature to the writing it feels like you're talking to a real person a lot of the time, and it really helps to create a rounded and engaging person. Melissa isn't perfect by any means, she has her flaws, she makes some bad choices over the course of the book, but she admits this. She points out that she'd have been smarter to have run away at the first sign of trouble, and jokes about how she's dumb for not doing so.
I also loved how when Melissa discovers the manuscript made by her step-grandfather where he tries to recreate a creepy old book he read that ties into the events surrounding the house she can't help but fall back onto her job as an editor and begin to pick his writing apart and add commentary about what he should have changed. Some books would go out of their way to create a lead that's perfect or idealised, who can handle the stress and horror around them, but Melissa has to fall back on what she know even when faced with terror because it's what a normal person does.
Kingfisher seems to have a way with making the characters that inhabit The Twisted Ones feel very real and likeable this way, and even those characters that might only be in a few scenes come across like flawed and faceted people, the kind of people you'd meet in real life. I especially adored Foxy, the no-nonsense woman who lives across the road who takes Melissa under her wing and tries to help her with her problems. I had such a clear sense of what she looked like and how she acted from the way she was written, and she was so charming and nice that I'd totally want to hang out with her for a night getting to know her better.
The horror elements of the book are especially well done too, and Kingfisher seemed to prefer to create a slow mounting dread rather than in-your-face horror; which I really enjoyed. There's a sense of things not quite being right for a good while before the 'big' scare moment comes. I'm not going to say what it is, but anyone who's read the book is sure to know the part I'm talking about. The fact that you also realise something in that moment that makes you realise the horror elements were introduced a lot earlier in the book, and have been skirting around the edges really made it uncomfortable.
Whilst the horror does certainly become more of a central focus towards the end of the story I loved that it took its time, that the book let you get to know the characters and the set-up first, means that when it started it just felt so much more uncomfortable.
I also loved that Kingfisher acknowledges the writing of Arthur Machen in the afterwards of the book, noting that element of the book were inspired by Machen's work. I definitely got vibes of his stuff when reading the story, and love that Kingfisher was influenced by it. Hopefully this will also lead to more people checking out his horror writing too.
The Twisted Ones is a book full of great, enjoyable characters that feel real. They come along and charm you so quickly that you'll be a little upset that there's not more of them in the book, but the nature of horror means that Melissa has to be alone for a lot of the scares to feel really frightening. Perhaps a sequel without any of the horror where Melissa just goes and stays with the friends she made to spend time with them could be something Kingfisher could work on in the future; I'd certainly love to read it. The scares and the tension mean that the horror works so well, and will probably put you off staying in the woods for a good while too. A brilliant horror experience.
