I absolutely loved Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places and immediately sought out her other horror novel, The Twisted Ones, and much like Places, this one didn’t disappoint. Filled with a sense of humor that is increasingly mixed with dread, this tale dives into folk horror, and leaves enough questions unanswered that the solutions your imagination creates, or that she hints at are really terrifying.

Mouse is a thirty-something freelance editor, and her father, for the first time has asked a favor of her; to clean out her deceased grandmother’s remote home, sort its belongings and help her father make a decision on what to do with it.

So she packs up her dog, Bongo, grabs her computer, and her phone, and heads out into the remote corners of North Carolina. No one in the family, or the surrounding area were big fans of her grandmother, and Mouse is troubled to find that she was also a hoarder.

As she begins to clean things out, she comes across papers from her grandmother’s late husband, Cotgrave, that tells ominous tales of strange things amongst the hills, and stones, and twisted ones. It doesn’t help that Mouse has started to have some strange encounters in the woods.

As the papers hint at ancient and horrifying things, Mouse’s own encounters become increasingly frightening, until she’s ready to do the smart thing, and just leave, head home, and forget all of this ever happened. Exactly what any rational person would do.

But events change to keep her there, and she, Bongo and her friend Foxy will not be ready for where the terror takes them.

Kingfisher delves right into the unnerving nature of folk horror, and delivers an incredibly thrilling, and delightfully scary read. I like how she balances the wry humor, the real life work and expectations with the incredibly horrific ideas she puts into play. Those effigies are going to stay with me for awhile.

And I like that we don’t get all the answers, it’s just regular people who find themselves caught up in extraordinary circumstances and how they, and probably the reader, would react to things. I like that at the end of the story I’m left pondering about the stones, the effigies, and the holler people that we catch glimpses of. What does it all mean, where are they from, how long have they been there?

The pacing, the writing style, the story, it all works, and your imagination really engages in the tale, bringing the effigies to life in a way that I don’t think a film could do justice, because the horror of them exist in how your imagination moves them.

Check out T. Kingfisher, and find something amazing to read today.