This occult thriller with heart boasts genuine scares.Melissa (Mouse to her friends) is tasked with clearing out the North Carolina cottage that once belonged to her grandmother, a woman known for her cruelty to all those around her – including her husband Cotgrave, Mouse’s “step-grandfather”.

Mouse is a down-to-earth character with a quick wit that never wavers, even when her circumstances are disturbing. Kingfisher neatly combines modern elements into a combined folktale and horror story that is rich in atmosphere and characterization ('She hadn't just hoarded she'd made walls and ramparts out of her possessions like she was expecting a siege'). Mouse wants nothing more to do with the house, but before she can leave, Bongo disappears, and she refuses to go home without him. Her neighbor, Foxy, calls these creatures the holler people. Everything in it sounds like the ravings of a man losing his mind until bizarre creatures show up outside Mouse's window. After a few days digging through junk, she unearths a rambling journal belonging to her stepgrandfather, Frederick Cotgrave, which tries to retell a fairy tale. When Melissa (aka Mouse) is asked by her father to clean out her grandmother's house, she heads to North Carolina with her coonhound, Bongo. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones is a gripping, terrifying tale bound to keep you up all night-from both fear and anticipation of what happens next.Ī witty young girl and horrific creatures tangle in this atmospheric folk horror novel from Kingfisher (a pen name for Ursula Vernon).

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. 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.

The twisted ones by t kingfisher