The Twisted Ones

Hardcover, 385 pages

English language

Published Jan. 17, 2019 by Saga Press.

ISBN:
978-1-5344-2957-4
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4 stars (31 reviews)

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. …

5 editions

Review of 'The Twisted Ones' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

3.5/5

The story starts off in such an interesting way as Mouse attempts to wrangle the mess left behind by her grandmother. I really liked the setup, the buildup of the house being slowly cleaned up and organized and small oddities that started happening over the days that she spent there.

I think her dog also brought a fun humor to the story and kept things grounded throughout. He was certainly not the smartest dog but definitely full of charm!

I think the notes left behind by her grandfather were one of the best parts. It felt real as he struggled to remember all the details of what he had learned. I wish there was more to this than was written. I had really hoped the Green Book was found, or at least pages of it to fill in more blanks. There was just so much that was unanswered even …

Review of 'The Twisted Ones' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A supernatural folk horror story infused with a consistent and mostly welcome line of humor all throughout, which mostly comes through in the main character's voice (it's a first person novel and told as a recollection of said supernatural events, so there's a lot of tangents and side-thoughts and editorialization in the middle of the narration).

The horror elements worked well for me; every threat is foreboding and creepy and when fully revealed the horror doesn't lose its power thanks to the author's descriptions and the MC's narration. It's when things kick into high gear in the last fifth or so of the book that I thought it lost some of its horror in exchange for action-y sequences that let me down a bit.

Review of 'Twisted Ones' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

THE TWISTED ONES combines the mundane drudgery and strangeness of cleaning out a hoarder's house with the fantastical creepiness of a technically-not-haunted forest with twisted rocks and strange effigies. 
I appreciate the way that the framing clearly situates this as a story being told after the narrator and her dog have survived the events in question, it would be a monumentally more stressful story if I'd had to wonder whether the dog dies. The dread lies instead in the very large gap between surviving and escaping unscathed, and in the pages upon pages of descriptions of what was in this particular hoarder's house. It ratcheted up the tension by inches, as the intensity of the supernatural events increased periodically while the sheer volume and detail of the house's contents were a steady drip of very plausible weirdness. 

The main character, Mouse, is a great narrator, with the quirkiness of specificity …

Review of 'Twisted Ones' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The Twisted Ones tells the story of a woman sent to the backwoods of North Carolina to clean out her grandmother's house. Her grandmother was a mean snake of a woman and turns out, she became a bit of a hoarder by the end, so the house is a disaster. But Melissa, known as Mouse, doesn't have much else going on, having just broken off a relationship, so she is ready to tackle the job with her dog Bongo.

Then things start getting weird. Tapping at the windows, strange noises in the woods, and an unsettling discovery after following a path. She finds her step-grandfather's notebook and it does more to confuse matters than to explain. Finally, her and the hippy grandmother from across the road become determined to solve the mysteries.

This book certainly started off fantastically! I couldn't put it down. The combination of Mouse's humor, her adorable …

Review of 'The Twisted Ones' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

As with most of V... Kingfisher's works, it's the details that drive it as well as the actual plot. This is normal, this is nifty, I can identify with this, when did this start making my skin crawl, when did... what. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

So I've been reading it in chunks interspersed with SF and Romance and it's still one of the creepier things I've read. Very well executed.

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