#Titanuary ‘The Twisted Ones’ by T.Kingfisher

About the book…

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.

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.

How cool does this sound?

‘The Twisted Ones’ is out from Titan Books in ebook and paperback format and I couldn’t recommend it any higher than it being a must read book.

‘She hid the book.’

This sentence, in the abscence of a wifi connection, begins Mouse’s investiagtion into the dark recesses of her grandmother’s house. After her death, it falls to Mouse to clear what is quickly observed to be a hoarder’s delight and a palace for mice.

In need of the money she and her father hope to generate from the sale of her house, she brings her awesome dog Bongo, another fantastic bit of characterisation from the writer who bought you the scene stealing cat, Beau, from ‘The Hollow Places’, to the isolated location in order to take stock and clean house, both literally and figuratively.

As with the Hollow Places, these books begin as journeys into a physical space and then become quickly metaphysical as they enter an interior monologue on identity, belonging, and the nature of family. It becomes quickly established that Mouse’s grandmother was well known-and not for good reasons-and has sequestered herself in a self imposed isolation since the death of her husband, Cotgrave.

It is his hidden room that she finds after following Bongo’s path of destruction through the newspaper bundles and hoarded Christmas decorations. This hidden room provides a base for Mouse, and an entry point for both her and the reader into the secrets of Mouse’s family history, through Cotgrave’s journals.

As she reads, the words making little to no actual sense, a creeping horror starts to settle into your stomach as mentions of a man named Ambrose, and keeping things at bay by the act of writing it down, start to coalesce into a otherworldly nightmare. Add in the mentions by local folk of things in the wood, creepily carved rocks and the isolated geography of Grandma’s house and soon you have a twisting story that is impossible to put down.

There are details which will strike horror into anyone who has had to parcel up the life of another, nuances which make you reconsider the history of family members and their habits. In particular, ‘the room of dead dolls’ struck deep at a reader whose own Nana kept a ‘best room’, or ‘parlour’, where everything was stifled, even the very air itself seemed stuck in time. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learnt that keeping that room ‘for best’, including the laying out and final viewing of the dead. No wonder I loved to creep in there, hide behind the plastic covered sofa and read my uncle’s horror paperbacks. But I never turned my back to the creepy eyed china dolls….

Anyhow, I digress. As with T.Kinfisher’s other works, this is a wonderfully creepy and sprawling novel which draws you in, makes you laugh at the dry, sarcastic wit of the main protagonist who quickly sets up house in your mind and tells you her tale in the hope of getting a sympathetic listener.

Go read it!

About the author…