Book Review: The Twisted Ones

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

I don’t usually think of myself as a person who likes horror, but I loved this book. Fairies used to be scary, but thanks to Midsummer Night’s Dream, Victorian pixies, and some of the modern YA about teenage girls dating Faerie kings, they’ve veered far away from the uncanny creatures who terrified our ancestors. This book brings scary fairies back, and manages to take Welsh and Irish lore and turn it Southern by setting the tale in North Carolina.

It helps that Kingfisher doesn’t call them “fairies.” These supernatural creatures are called “the holler people.” But there are elements that resonate. There’s a mysterious path that leads up a hill which is far, far away. There are strange, twisted constructs of bone and stone, white people in the woods, and unexplained noises. There are mysteriously carved stones with disconcerting animal-like shapes. There’s also a book with poems in it that seem to get into your brain.

The supernatural elements are mixed with real elements, and I found those engaging and relatable. Our heroine is charged with clearing out her hoarder grandmother’s house to sell it, dealing not just with the burden of all the crap she collected, but the burden of what a sour and nasty person she was. The people in town are quirky and interesting without delving too deeply into North Carolina hillbilly stereotypes.

Kingfisher used several techniques which worked very well. One, she introduces a benign-seeming detail, the sound of knocking at night, which the narrator interprets as being a kind of woodpecker. It has this innocent mystery about it, like “huh, I wonder what that is?” and when the narrator discovers what’s making that noise, the danger of it backfills the entire novel with menace. Kingfisher also does this with the narrator’s character, when the narrator says she came to clear out the house because people in her family never ask for anything, so when they do ask, they are obligated to do it. Later, someone asks the narrator to do something and this character flaw comes into play. Kingfisher also uses Bongo, the narrator’s hound dog, as a great character and plot device. Bongo acts entirely like a hound dog, which is occasionally a major asset (Bongo knows when the bad guys are there) and sometimes a major hinderance (Bongo has to go out to pee, but the monsters are out there.)

I also appreciated how nuanced this book is. It’s not entirely good versus evil. The most evil people in the book are also sympathetic (except the dead grandmother, who is a piece of work, though she did prove useful). The heroes do sketchy things sometimes. Even the monsters have things about them that make them sympathetic. The narrator distrusts the story she’s told. Is her grandfather really seeing fairies, or is he merely suffering dementia? Is the girl in the greenbook really doing magic spells and rituals, or does she have OCD? Did the creepy thing she saw in the woods disappear, or was she just unable to find it again?

Fantasy and reality are two subjects which do not emulsify well, but I think this novel succeeded brilliantly.




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