Folk horror in your backyard
T. Kingfisher & a couple of revenge slashers
The table went suddenly silent, except for the blare of the radio. It was playing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
If you are ever planning on having a serious conversation with people you barely know, about weird carvings on an impossible hill behind your house, try to get a better soundtrack.
—The Twisted Ones
Hi, friends,
I hope all is well with you.
Unrelated to anything other than the idea of folk horror in your own backyard, I found an almost entirely intact mouse skeleton in the way back of a cupboard this weekend.
Obviously I kept it.
And unrelated to ANYTHING, I was watching a re-run of Bones before work—it’s my go-to show for hula hooping at the moment—and John Francis Daley showed up as Sweets, and I had, like, this SHOCKINGLY VISCERAL MOMENT OF RAGE at how they ultimately wrote him off the show, ugh. So I might be in the market for a new hula hooping show soon?
A little while ago, I mentioned loving T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places:
And I’m happy to report that I just finished up The Twisted Ones—another portal-ish fantasy (not a doorway per se, but certainly a magical path to another world, so I’m going with ‘portal-ish’ for simplicity’s sake)—and I was so INTO IT that I ordered both of them AND two of her upcoming novellas for my library, because what the hell, I can’t be the only one in this town who loves contemporary dark fantasy narrated by somewhat crabby ladies.
[To be more clear, I haven’t read Nettle & Bone or What Moves the Dead, so I don’t know anything about the narration, but based on my reaction to the two Kingfisher books I *have* read, I think it’s safe to say that they’ll be a good fit regardless.]
ANYWAY. The Twisted Ones follows Melissa—she goes by Mouse—who is cleaning out her dead grandmother’s house, accompanied only by her beloved redbone coonhound, Bongo.
Mouse has no illusions about who her dead grandmother was:
Honestly, I don’t know how she managed to get married once, let alone twice. My grandmother was a nasty, vicious woman. Mean as a snake, as my aunt Kate used to say, which is pretty unkind to snakes. Snakes just want to be left alone. My grandmother used to call relatives up to tell them it served them right when their dog died. She was born unkind and graduated to cruel early.
But family is family, and her father isn’t physically capable of dealing with the house, so it falls to her. Oh, also, her dead grandmother was a hoarder.
Like The Hollow Places, The Twisted Ones features a heroine entering another world and VERY QUICKLY realizing that NOT ALL OTHER WORLDS ARE COOL PLACES TO VISIT. Some people think of portal fantasies as an opportunity for adventure and magic and delight… and some people think of them as an opportunity to get maimed/dead/worse REAL FAST.
I am in the latter camp, and I appreciate these books for reflecting my worldview, heh. And as much as I like to think of myself as pretty competent and self-reliant, I will admit that I totally and completely identified with this:
This train of thought would end with me crouched in the bathroom with a shotgun aimed at the door. This wold not help Bongo and also I didn’t know how to use a shotgun.
They’re both atmospheric and scary but also warm and FUNNY. For example, here’s Mouse on what she’s decided to do with the ENTIRE ROOM FULL OF DOLLS that her grandmother had squirreled away:
“I had all these thoughts about donating them to needy kids or something, but I think the needy kids have probably suffered enough. I’m just going to take them to the dump.”
While they’re both standalones, there are a BUNCH more similarities between the two:
They both star female narrators who are dealing with recent breakups with trifling dudes, and they’re both largely alone in places filled floor to ceiling with weird-ass shit. (In The Hollow Places, our narrator is taking care of her uncle’s museum of the weird; in The Twisted Ones, as I said, she’s cleaning out her grandmother’s house.)
They both feature Supportive Baristas.
Neither one features a romance.
They both feature Beloved Pets who make it through—I *really* appreciated that it was made clear within the first few pages that Bongo survives the whole ordeal. (Because, hoo boy, I love horror, but it is not generally a genre that is kind to animals.)
They both feature inanimate objects that are more animate than they should be.
They’re both inspired by/expansions of older stories: The Hollow Places comes out of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and The Twisted Ones comes out of Arthur Machen’s The White People.
I am SO excited to read her next two books, and in the meantime, I think I’ll track down the two older stories that these were based on.
Watching: Revenge Slashers
Reading Christopher Pike has made me crave ‘80s teen/college slashers, but good grief, there are not a whole lot of them that we haven’t seen yet, so I’m expanding into the ‘90s and the aughts.
The Initiation (Larry Stewart, 1984): I wasn’t a Melrose Place person, so the only reason I was at all familiar with Daphne Zuniga was the Again With This podcast. Anyway, Daphne is a nice girl who is pledging a sorority, it’s Hell Week, and suddenly she starts having a recurring nightmare in which her childhood self witnesses a man catch on fire and apparently burn to death. It’s got mean girl pranks, a shopping mall lock-in, an asylum break out, a rather serious case of amnesia that’s only really introduced halfway in, a rad research assistant, a poor man’s Eric Stoltz as the TA love interest, a couple of line readings from Zuniga that are wonderfully bananas hilarious (unintentionally, I think, but still great), and FREUDIAN DREAM ANALYSIS COMPLETE WITH ENDLESS EXPOSITION AND LOTS OF SYMBOLS LISTED ON THE CHALKBOARD. I… LOVED IT??
Valentine (Jamie Blanks, 2001): Tammy & The T-Rex—in which Denise Richards falls in love with Paul Walker, whose brain is stuck into the body of an animatronic dinosaur—made me a Denise Richards fan for life, so I’d have watched this one even if David Boreanaz hadn’t been in it. And that’s probably a good thing, as I’d argue that poor old David was the weakest link here.
Anyway, at a sixth grade dance, some mean kids catch the class nerd making out with a wallflower under the bleachers, she turns on him & they beat him up. Years later, someone in a Cupid mask starts murdering everyone involved. COULD IT POSSIBLY BE THE NERD, ALL GROWN UP AND LOOKING FOR REVENGE??? It’s not super-memorable, but Denise Richards is great at being a Mean Girl, and there’s one particular set with a staircase and red plaid wallpaper that has to be seen to be believed.
Talk to you Thursday,
Leila
Aw, I'll bet your mouse is cool. My from a first visit to the Outlaws I discovered their intact lizard skeleton they had pinned to the felt board where they stored their pool cues... aaaand then I discovered the hummingbird corpses in the freezer. Himself found out that they were his Dad's... and with no other explanation on offer so, we just backed away slowly. (The father Outlaw was not, sadly as metal as all of this might suggest.)
I am a HUGE muppet-flailing fan of T.Kingfisher but she writes horror way too well in the subtle way she includes it in almost every book written under the Kingfisher name, and I don't actually DO horror, so haven't yet read Hollow or Twisted (though I've nearly talked myself into that one, but I read a Caitlin Doughtery nonfic last night [she's the Ask A Mortician chick] and that gave me some teeth-grinding stress dreams, so maybe not... ). I am looking forward earnestly to Nettle & Bone, because fairytale horror is about the level of scary I can do and they're always SO snidely funny.
Also, I am snickering inappropriately that there was a horror novel called The White People and now I must at least read the flyleaf...