If Only a Better Writer Had Written It...Oh Wait! They Did: The Twisted Ones

My quest for a contemporary horror author that I can actually appreciate is ongoing. I enjoyed reading The Twisted Ones, a story about a woman asked to clear out her dead grandmother's house and finds weird things in the woods behind, but the whole time, I was thinking about how the authorial voice was getting in the story's way. Even as things get weirder and creepier, you don't really feel the impact of those moments because of the perpetual snarkiness of the narrator.

But there were so many elements of this story - the person writing something maddening that has happened to them, the lost manuscript, the dreamscape/journey into other worlds, secret societies and even more secret universal mysteries - that smacked of Lovecraft's bread and butter. If only this book had his eldritch voice, I thought, this would be a great story with terrifying effect. In addition, a lot of the things that are set up at the beginning, like the hints to a secret society and the strange nature of Mouse's grandmother and the relationship between the late woman and her husband, are never resolved. They end up being loose threads that would have been infinitely more interesting to follow than the multiple passages detailing the act of clearing out a house filled with junk.

Only after I finished the book and read the Author's Note did I realize that this was heavily based on Arthur Machen's The White People, which was of course also on my to-read list. Better yet, this book was based on a letter that Lovecraft himself wrote to Machen about his book. So even without knowing any of this, my mind still insisted that Lovecraft or those of his ilk would have been better suited to tell this tale- it reeked of Lovecraft and his circle. The fact is they did - I just wish I'd realized in advance. I would have just plucked a different book from the shelf.

I'm very close to giving up on contemporary horror. Very close.

K. Rating:2/5