Let’s be honest: that sounds like it should be an utterly terrible read “Diary of a Lady Cleaning a House”. What ensues is a 381 page first person account by a woman cleaning out the home of her deceased ornery grandmother, who - among other things - was a hoarder. Mouse’s dad is too old to do it himself and he tells the cash-strapped Mouse she can keep the profit from whatever she salvages and sells, including from the sale of the house itself. He asks her if she would be willing to help clean out the North Carolina house that belonged to her dead grandmother. One day, she gets a phone call from her father. Our protagonist is a 30-something freelance editor named Melissa (called Mouse). It blends rural life in the American South with old Welsh folk tales into a creepy and unnerving concoction which is nevertheless delicious. Kingfisher’s story is a pretty excellent exercise in folk horror, which has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately thanks to movies like Midsommar and The VVitch. Dangle a bit of Arthur Machen (or something Machen-adjacent) in front of me and money begins flying out of my pocket. That alone was enough to separate me from my money.
To be honest, I bought it because I was pretty sure the title and the story on the back were direct allusions to a classic of pre-Lovecraft weird fiction, The White Onesby Arthur Machen. (Turns out that’s because she’s actually Hugo-award winning author Ursula Vernon under a pen name.) I also had not heard any whispers of how good (or bad) the book might be.
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.When I picked up a copy of The Twisted Ones, I had never heard of the book or Ms Kingfisher. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
