Review – The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Length: 399 pages
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Release Date: October 1, 2019
ASIN: B07P55QS3X
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed e-book from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars
“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.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on ebook from my library.
Thoughts: This was okay but definitely not my favorite Kingfisher book. This starts out as a slow-paced type of haunted house horror novel, then pivots more towards being a dark fairy tale. The pacing was inconsistent and the folklore was sloppily dealt with. I also felt like the main character made a lot of really dumb decisions without a lot of motivation to do so.
The premise is that Mouse gets a call from her dad who wants her to go out and clean out her grandma’s house. Her grandma was a bit of a hoarder but Mouse needs the money from the house sale and is trying to escape a failed relationship, so she agrees to the plan. Once she gets out there strange things start happening around the house and she finds a strange journal of her grandpa’s that she starts to read.
I almost stopped reading this a number of times because I was just bored. However, I was determined to make this my scary Halloween read for the year so I pushed through. The whole thing was very forgettable and just poorly put together. This starts out as a very deliberately paced creepy haunted house type of story. As the story continues it picks up pace but also just gets plan weird as Mouse ends up venturing into an odd parallel, faerie-esque world.
Character-wise the stars of this story are definitely Mouse’s dog and the old hippie neighbor lady Mouse ends up hanging with. Mouse herself is pretty ordinary and a bit boring and makes a lot of poor decisions. As for the writing, it flows well enough and this was a pretty quick read if you can stay interested.
My Summary (3/5): Overall I wasn’t a huge fan of this book, I thought it was one of Kingfisher’s weaker stories and prefer her fantasy books a lot more. This was just slow and boring, the main protagonist was hard to engage with, and the folklore seemed scattered. I would skip this one and check out Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War series or one of her fairy tale retellings instead.
