Book Review - T Kingfisher (The Twisted Ones)

 

Audio Review of this Podcast will follow on the book review Podcast ‘Reading in Bed’ in September

The Twisted Ones

Bio:

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.

From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

This book gets off to a great start with a decent start with the introduction of Mouse and I did think Mouse’s voice is pitch perfect right from the set up of the book and I found while Horror it certainly wasn’t, I really did like the Psychological element off the book as the book began to build up with Mouse cleaning out her grandmother’s cabin after the latter passed away and Mouse stumbles across her grandfather’s old journal.

I also loved her relationship with Bongo and the Lovecraft kind off start to the book surprised me too but it was a surprising throwback and had me curious to see where this was going next as I had the feeling this was going not a straight forward book in the slightest.

This was certainly the case as it is sadly one of those books which seemed like to take ages to actually get going – say the halfway stage at least and by that point it had lost my interest as the dialogue seemed off key in places leaving me confused was the narrator was in her teens or her 30.

I didn't finish it, the pacing was off for me throughout and while I am always a believer off books taking their time getting going but this book suffered from a lack of movement / development and caused me to drop it at 300 pages.

4/10