I twisted myself about like the twisted ones…
The timing couldn’t have been better. On the same week that North Carolina finally gets some real fall weather (ie: the temperature dropped below 90 degrees), NC resident T. Kingfisher (also know as Ursula Vernon) released a brand new book, The Twisted Ones. This is her first foray into full-length horror and it’s set surprisingly close to where I live.
Melissa (known to her friends as Mouse) is stuck for the foreseeable future in a house in rural North Carolina, cleaning out her late grandmother’s home. Digging through several decades worth of junk hoarded by a woman no one in her family liked isn’t exactly rewarding, but she’s got her loyal coonhound Bongo to keep her company. She’s also stumbled across something fascinating: the journal of her grandmother’s late husband, Frederick Cotgrave. Poor guy seemed to have been going senile toward the end, his journal rambles a lot and keeps mentioning how “they” are watching, and this probably isn’t the best thing to be reading all alone, late at night, in the middle of nowhere…
…what is that tapping sound?
Hoarding as a plot device can be tricky; there’s usually a lot of misery involved, and there’s something pitiful about the random trash that the owner physically couldn’t throw away, like stacks of newspapers or an entire bag of used chopsticks. I thought the underlying story would be the main character learning about the hardships that made her grandmother into a difficult person to love, so she could eventually reconcile with her memory at least. Then Mouse mentions that her grandmother used to call people to tell them they deserved it when their dog died and I thought aw hell no. You don’t need to spare any sympathy for Mouse’s grandmother – who was a horrible person – so you’re free to enjoy (?) all the ways Mouse finds to just roll up her sleeves and deal with what she finds in her house.
The clutter didn’t feel like my father’s neglect; it felt like a manifestation of my grandmother’s malice.
One of the many things I love about Kingfisher’s writing is how she takes you deep inside her characters’ heads and shows you all the way that they’re uniquely mixed up, normal, possessing common sense and the ability to ignore that common sense, and just all around entertainingly human. Mouse is no exception.
Her family has never been demonstrably loving or even affectionate, but when her father actually reaches out and asks if she can deal with the mess at her grandmother’s place she says yes, no question. She adores her dog while acknowledging every single way he’s as brainless and annoying as a coonhound can be. She’s got the organizational skills to clear a mountain of junk out of a house while still doing her editing job whenever she can spend a few hours on the local coffee shop’s wi-fi (keeping up a running internal monologue about family and public radio pledge drives the entire time). And yet she remains in a weird (and possibly dangerous) situation, simply because Cotgrave’s journal mentioned a “Green Book”, and she’s determined to find out where her grandmother hid the thing.
This is important, because the sensible plan would be to tell her dad to have her grandmother’s house bulldozed. Part of Mouse’s reasoning is that she knows poor Cotgrave had a pretty miserable life, and letting his book stay lost forever feels like one more way her grandmother “won”. But let’s be honest, the biggest reason is because it’s a secret occult book and it’s hidden somewhere in the house. You’d have a tough time dragging me away from that; the temptation to find out exactly what’s inside is just too much to resist.
…right up until the point where it stops being worth it, but now it’s too late to leave.
Maybe I was sitting here wasting time with a useless partial transcript of a diary written a hundred years ago by a woman with severe issues and meanwhile there were monsters outside and I didn’t have a gun or a chain saw or even a large brick.
The strange noises outside the house keep getting stranger, there’s an impossible (literally impossible) geological feature in the surrounding area, and then Mouse and Bongo stumble across something in the woods that has Mouse running in terror. She can’t abandon the house, and she knows she can’t convince the police that there’s anything going on other than “kids today” and “lady from out of town miiiight need to chill.” Mouse’s eccentric neighbors have a little more experience with how things in the area can be a bit…odd (good God I love Foxy. How do I sign up for a neighbor like that?) so it’s lucky that she has some support there.
Just a shame that there’s literally nothing they can do to fix this.
I’m the kind of person who pictures how a novel might look if it were made into a movie. I’m also a horror movie wimp and would probably have to watch a The Twisted Ones movie scrunched up in the corner of the sofa with my hands over my eyes. There are so many different flavors of scary here: being alone in an unfamiliar house and there are sounds outside. Running through the woods knowing that something is right 
behind you. The subtle horror from a phrase repeating itself in your head over, and over, and over. The stone carving that seems to be moving when you’re not looking. Being in absolute fear for your life and also having to worry about protecting your dog. (Man, that one struck a chord with me. Your brain will always come up with the worst case scenario for the animal that trusts you to keep it safe.) There are even a couple of instances that are very close to a jump scare, to say nothing of those relentless sections where you’re left going gaaahhh! Make it stop make it stop make it stop…
The afterward mentions that this novel was inspired by a Machen story from 1904 (which I haven’t read yet, although MAYBE I SHOULD NOW), and Kingfisher has used that as the basis for a complex, eldritch backstory for the strangeness going on in central North Carolina. It’s a wonderfully horrifying story, with moments of whistling past the graveyard humor.
It’s also the darkest thing that Kingfisher has written to date. The book starts with Mouse pretty much telling you that she’s been broken by everything that happened, and by the ending you definitely understand why.