I gave T. Kingfisher’s horror oeuvre another shot and I’ve come to the conclusion that I like her romance/fantasy writing more, so I’ll give another one of those a try if I want to read anything else by her. This one follows Melissa, who goes by Mouse, as she heads down to North Carolina to clean out her grandmother’s house. She’s just had a bad breakup and needs to get out of Pittsburgh for a while, so when her dad asks her to take on the job, she agrees. When she gets there, the house is a hoarding situation and she realizes she’ll be there for longer than she expected. As she hauls endless junk out of the house she starts seeing weird things in the woods. Then she ends up following her dog through a tunnel of trees to a hill that can’t exist. Things go downhill from there for her.
My main issue here is that The Twisted Ones has a very similar plot and structure to The Hollow Places, so maybe I read them too close together and started thinking about how quickly she might have churned these out. Both the main characters had a bad breakup/divorce, head back to the home of a relative, and go through a portal into a world next to ours full of horrible creatures. It was just too similar. I like folk horror and moments where someone finds an old diary with descriptions of the horror, so this had some cool moments of spookiness that I enjoyed. It was a straight forward read, I did want to know what happened throughout, and Kingfisher is a competent writer. I just wasn’t blown away and it reminded me a lot of Adam Neville’s The House of Small Shadows, which has a similar folk horror/creepy constructs vibe while being legitimately really scary.