Books › The Twisted Ones
The Twisted Ones
400 pages
A deeply unsettling descent into backwoods terror, anchored by a fiercely relatable narrator and her very good dog.
What it feels like
Reading this feels like walking through a dark, overgrown forest while whistling a cheerful tune to keep the panic at bay. The narrative voice is incredibly grounding—wry, pragmatic, and deeply relatable—which only makes the creeping, surreal horror that much more effective. It starts with the mundane dread of cleaning out a hoarder's house and slowly twists into a claustrophobic nightmare of Appalachian folklore and impossible geometry. The pacing is brisk, pulling you through the dread with sharp humor and a fierce, protective love for a hound dog named Bongo. It is a perfect fit for readers who want genuine, skin-crawling chills but prefer to face the dark with a flashlight and a healthy dose of snark.
- Mood
- creepy
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- eerie
- Tone
- wry
- conversational
- self-aware
- pragmatic
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- inherited baggage · isolation · the uncanny · human-animal bonds · Appalachian folklore
- The writing
- Conversational, witty, and highly relatable, grounding bizarre, otherworldly horrors in everyday pragmatism.
- The arc
- Moves from the mundane exhaustion of family obligations into a creeping, surreal paranoia, culminating in a desperate, adrenaline-fueled fight for survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love their creeping dread cut with a healthy dose of snark, and who appreciate a protagonist whose first instinct is to protect her dog.
Content notes
- hoarding
- animal endangerment
- body horror
- claustrophobia
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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