As you might be able to guess, the house is in the absolute middle of nowhere, North Carolina, with no cell service, no internet, and thick forest on all sides. So Mouse volunteers to spend a few weeks at the house, clearing it out room by room with Bongo and her pickup truck. No one in the family is particularly upset about this, though it does leave the question of what to do with her house, which is hoarder-level cluttered.

The setup is thus: Mouse’s grandmother, a cruel and vindictive woman, has died. Maybe just hire a cleaning crew next time. (You can read “ The White People” for free via Project Gutenberg, by the by.) It’s a classic of the genre, and lays the groundwork for the events of Kingfisher’s novel. The second thing I need to tell you about The Twisted Ones is that you don’t need to have read Arthur Machen’s 1904 horror short “The White People” in order to understand or enjoy it, but it does enrich the experience if you have. That doesn’t make what you’re about to read any less terrifying. She and Bongo, her sweet-natured, stupid hound, come out the other side of the story physically unharmed.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way – Mouse, our narrator and protagonist, will tell you this herself in the first chapter. Kingfisher (Hugo Award-winning author Ursula Vernon, writing pseudonymously) is that the dog lives. The first thing I need to tell you about The Twisted Ones by T. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones… – “The White People,” Arthur Machen

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