But Kingfisher pulls off her complicated construction with both ease and charm.įrom there, The Twisted Ones grows more tangled. Stories within stories within stories: It's a conceit that could easily turn into a mess in lesser hands. In its pages, a mystery begins to unfold, even as odd people and even odder apparitions start to converge on Mouse as if she were a magnet. She becomes fascinated with him, however, as she reads deeper into the notebook. She comes across a notebook that belonged to her deceased step-grandfather, a quiet man named Frederick Cotgrave whom Mouse never particularly bonded with when she was growing up. Melissa, who goes by the nickname Mouse, arrives in rural North Carolina to put her late grandmother's house in order. The setup of The Twisted Ones is deceptively straightforward. Although a contemporary horror novel, The Twisted Ones ties itself to Machen's legendary story in ways that are both ominous and ingenious. Kingfisher, who also writes under her real name, Ursula Vernon - appears in that quote. It's no coincidence that the title of The Twisted Ones - the new book by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author T.

Lovecraft considered one of the greatest horror tales ever written. 'Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.' So goes one of the most chilling lines from ' The White People' by Arthur Machen, a 1904 short story that H. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. 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.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Twisted Ones Author T. And if she doesn't face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.įrom Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. 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.Īlone 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. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. After all, how bad could it be?Īnswer: pretty bad.

When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. 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.

The twisted ones kingfisher