The Twisted Ones

What Readers Say

The thing I keep seeing in every thread where this book comes up is the word "wrong." Not scary in an obvious, in-your-face way — just wrong. A stone cairn that wasn't there yesterday. A deer that stands too still. Kingfisher lets the dread accumulate in small details until the landscape itself starts to feel hostile, and readers pick up on exactly that. One commenter described it as "creepy, slightly folkloric," which nails the atmosphere better than most full reviews do.

It gets recommended alongside The Hollow Places — also by Kingfisher — almost every time, and the consensus seems to be that they're companion pieces in tone even if the stories are separate. A few readers actually prefer The Hollow Places, but the ones who love The Twisted Ones tend to be emphatic about it. I've seen it called "great" and "delightfully scary" in threads specifically asking for books that genuinely unsettle seasoned horror readers. That's not nothing.

It also gets credit for something I don't see praised often enough: the protagonist isn't a damsel. Mouse is competent and grounded, which makes what happens to her feel more real, not less.

Who It's For

If you're the kind of reader who finds slow-build atmospheric horror more unsettling than gore, this is exactly your book. Kingfisher works in the tradition of Arthur Machen — she actually based this on Machen's "The White People" — so if you like your horror folkloric and rooted in place rather than supernatural spectacle, you'll feel at home here.

It also works for readers who are specifically tired of horror that leans on women's trauma as its primary engine. The horror here is external and folkloric, not psychological abuse dressed up as genre. Mouse's divorce is background noise; the woods are the threat.

I'd recommend it to anyone who loved The Haunting of Hill House for the atmosphere and Mexican Gothic for the sense of a place that is genuinely, irreducibly wrong. It sits somewhere in that neighborhood — literary enough to have a real sense of craft, scary enough to justify the genre label.

Reading Context

This reads best when you have uninterrupted stretches — not because it's dense, but because the dread is cumulative and you don't want to break the spell by putting it down for two days. Evening reading, ideally with a window nearby so you can look outside occasionally and remember the woods aren't actually doing anything unusual.

I'd read The Twisted Ones before The Hollow Places if you're new to Kingfisher's horror. Not because you have to, but because starting here lets you see the template before she pushes it further in The Hollow Places. Either way, if you finish one and want more, the other is right there.