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.
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.
From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. 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.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Published by Simon & Schuster, October 2019. Run time of 11 hours and 4 minutes.
I want to state something important right up front- THE DOG DOES NOT DIE! 🙂 Ok, now to the review…
The Twisted Ones has been on my radar since it came out in 2019. It sounded so interesting but I was worried it might have animal death in it. After lots of research and finding out the dog doesn’t die, I decided to go ahead and give it a go.
This is such a strange one! Strange in the best way though. I absolutely loved all the bizarre twisted ones. Very, very creepy….things. Sometimes it felt like the descriptions of them were a little too vague. Was not a huge fan of that. The descriptions we do get are pretty great and messed up! I wish there had been more of that.
Loved the performance from the narrator. She sounded so…. REAL. The characters have a great sense of humor and the narrator is perfect at delivering the lines. She is also great at accents and age. Hillary was just perfect for this book.
Now, The Twisted Ones starts of slowly. There is a lot of cleaning grandma’s house for the first chunk of the book. It does feel like it takes a little while to figure out what is going on on, or for shit to get weird. Honestly, I didn’t mind this too much. You can feel this… uneasy feeling out in the woods. You know something is wrong with the place. The tension and atmosphere slowly build up as you wait to see what is in the woods.
This is a unique folk horror story. I’m not sure I’ve read anything like it before. Even with vague descriptions and a slow build, I enjoyed this one a lot. The narrator and the creatures are just straight up fun! The last hour or so of the book was just crazy bananas! I kinda even felt a little bad for the twisted ones. 😮
Creature From The Book Lagoon 