As one might guess, the noises aren’t just harmless nature sounds, and soon Mouse finds herself being drawn into stories of ‘twisted ones’, and stumbling into landscapes that shouldn’t be there. At night she has to contend with her grief and guilt regarding Cotgrave, her anger at her grandmother, and strange noises she hears outside that Bongo just won’t leave alone. Mouse and her grandmother didn’t get along, as her grandmother was a TERRIBLE human being, but Mouse was close to her stepgrandfather, Cotgrave, and as she’s cleaning memories of her time with him bubble up. A woman named Mouse (our first person narrator) has gone to her grandmother’s house (along with her dog Bongo) to clean it out after she has died. “The Twisted Ones” starts out with a lot of promise. Yet I keep the faith that I won’t be frustrated every time I pick up such a book. Have I been burned by this premise before? Yes. After all, while it was described as ‘folk horror’ by some reviewers, the idea of monsters in the woods slowly creeping up was too good of a premise to pass by. Because of this, I wanted to read “The Twisted Ones” by T. But I am always wanting to give the subgenre a chance.

I’ve read a few folk horror novels, and none of them really stood out to me as particularly engrossing or engaging. While I love the movie “The Wicker Man” (and “The Blair Witch Project”, if you can classify it as such? I feel like maybe you could?), I still haven’t seen “Midsommer” and don’t feel a huge draw to do so.

Review: Of all the horror genres, folk horror tends to be one of the few that I have a hard time sinking my teeth into. 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. Publishing Info: Gallery/Saga Press, October 2019īook Description: 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.

The twisted ones by t kingfisher