Fiona Knight's Reviews > The Twisted Ones

What a way to kick off Spooky Month - The Twisted Ones had me watching over my shoulder when I was reading it at home alone, and I loved every minute.

T. Kingfisher - or Ursula Vernon, if that's how you know her - is probably best known for her fairytale retellings or interpretations. This is my first full-length novel of hers, and what an absolute stunner. Folklore being largely an oral tradition has lent the author an incredibly readable "voice" in her writing; and she's not afraid to use that readability against you.

The Twisted Ones starts with our protagonist, Melissa/Mouse, and one of the most faithful of trusty sidekicks, her dog Bongo (named for the antelope, not the drum). Her grandmother has passed away, there's a house to clean out, and that's how our heroine finds herself in the woods before it all starts going sideways. It's a slow and subtle decline into oddity - there's a phrase that's repeated throughout that slips between otherwise unrelated sentences, the local radio station is having a pledge drive and the DJ is either sleep deprived or following her own spiral out of known reality, and the borders between known and impossible start to blur for the reader as much as they do for the narrator.

The scarier moments, when things go from subtly not quite right to everything wrong and the impossible is right there trying to get inside the house, are scary. The best horror gets under your skin and pops up again when you're home alone or in an unexpectedly dark room, and this book is going to come back to haunt me, I can tell already. But I had a hell of a time reading it, I'd recommend it to anyone even mildly interested in horror, and it's really ignited my wish to finally get around to the author's other full-length work. There's not a lot I can say to speak more highly of it than that!

Edit on reread: It took me four and a half years to come back to this, because it's ridiculously unsettling, and it took me a few days to read because I kept having to pause as it got dark. But then, I finished it in the light and I kept having to turn around just to make sure that patch of world I can't see behind me didn't have something unexpected in it. Great book. And having devoured a ton of T. Kingfisher work in the years between those two reads, I'm absolutely delighted it spurred me into finally getting around to properly reading one of my favourite authors.