Thread by @seananmcguire

All right, my dears and my darlings, gather 'round and hear the tale of me scaring the ever-living crap out of myself for a good cause.

You see, I have many talented friends, and we all sort of look abashed and wring our hands and don't ask each other for blurbs, out of fear that it will look like a weird form of nepotism. "Oh, Seanan blurbed you? You have a guest room and a frog pond, right?"

But sometimes our editors are braver and smarter and also give less of a crap what people think, because they know we're all essentially honest and won't blurb books we don't like. So it was that T. Kingfisher's editor asked me to read THE TWISTED ONES.

(As we all know, T. Kingfisher is really @UrsulaV, who has a guest room AND a frog pond AND several excellent cats AND will drive me around to play turtle bingo AND is sort of married to me.)

I agreed because I'll try anything once. And then I promptly lost my first copy of the book to a Mom-and-condiments incident, making me think that perhaps it was not to be. So @navahw sent me a second copy, and I figured why not? I'm bored.

I did not stay bored for long.

Reading THE TWISTED ONES is like listening to a comforting NPR radio show as it turns slowly darker and stranger and more dangerous; it is a boiled frog of a book. You realize as the narrator does that things are bad. Very bad. Very, very bad.

At one point, I literally said "...oh," out loud and put the book down for a few minutes. I couldn't stop reading. I was afraid to see what would happen next.

If T. Kingfisher does not at minimum make the Bram Stoker ballot next year, I will be stunned. This is the tightest, most brilliantly crafted horror story I've read in years.

(Yes, it shares a name with a Five Nights at Freddy's book, so please be sure you're buying the right one. I can't testify to the other.)

If you like:

* Horror
* Modern gothic
* Familial ghost stories
* Good dogs written by dog lovers
* Twisting yourself around like the twisted ones
* Making faces like the faces in the rocks

...please pick up this book. You won't be sorry. Or maybe you will.

What was that noise?