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.
Continuing my journey through T. Kingfisher’s books, I picked up The Twisted Ones next. I like Kingfisher’s “average woman” characters, and Mouse is definitely one of those. Mouse also has the best dog, Bongo, who also ends up dragging her into another world with the world’s freakiest rocks.
The horror is wrapped up in Mouse’s feelings of obligation toward figuring out the answer to a mystery that should have stayed a mystery. The horror is at first contained within the hoard that her nasty-ass grandma (scorned unabashedly for her shitty personality) has left behind. Reborn baby doll bedroom, shorthanded as the dead baby room? Yeah, dude.
Also, in case you don’t know what a reborn baby is:
These things go for hundreds per doll, and some people use them to help dealing with the loss of a child and other people collect them as art. But… in this book they are just part of the Hoard.
The Hoard boasts endless ephemera of the past and weigh on Mouse, who is trying her best to just clear it out so her pops can sell it and maybe she can get a decent cut of the cash. I mean, she’s a freelance remote editor. She needs the cash.
Along the way she takes Bongo out for walks, accidentally stumbles upon The Horrors, and makes friends with the people across the street. The people across the street are reliable and odd and I love them so very much. They feed her, they help her fend off the Horrors, and they even read alongside her the weird journal with the Weirder Answers. Hell, Foxy goes into the other world with her.
I think the book is front-loaded with the creep factor. The Horrors peering in. The tapping. The fear of what could be in the house, or around the house. It answers far too many questions for it to remain a frightening mystery (IMO) by the end, but I still enjoyed it despite the fact it delved into fantasy. The ending was a bit light as well.
