(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Language of the Night: "The Twisted Ones" and Appalachian Folk Horror [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-23 “People say they know things and try to look smart, but I don’t think anybody knows anything for sure. The hills’re just where the holler people live. Old-timers talk about seeing ’em now and again. Tall and skinny and white like nobody you ever saw.” p. 164 Life has been getting in the way lately. I meant to finish this installment of T. Kingfisher’s Southern horror two weeks ago but, well, it didn’t work. So let me pick up the dropped threads from last time’s discussion of A House with Good Bones as a Southern novel and expand the view a little by looking at her 2019 novel The Twisted Ones, which she described as “Andy Griffith meets the Blair Witch Project.” I already discussed the “book in conversation with other books” aspect of a few of Kingfisher’s books, so I won’t revisit it here, except to note that Arthur Machen’s 1904 short story “The White People” is the inspiration, and it’s a real creep-fest. Kingfisher also takes H.P. Lovecraft’s interpretation that the sculpture of two creatures in rut can and will impregnate women, but let’s not look at that part too closely just now. No, because my focus tonight is on the setting and the aspects of The Twisted Ones that qualify as Southern fiction — I discussed Southern fiction in very broad strokes last time, so I won’t rehash that part of it beyond the focus on place and brooding sense of history. Channeling my inner-Supreme-Court-Justice-Potter-Stewart, Southern fiction is hard to define, but you know it when you read it, whether it’s James Dickey or Charlaine Harris. Or T. Kingfisher’s North Carolina The Twisted Ones is a variation on Southern fiction — it’s the Appalachian subset of Southern. Drawn from a swath of land that encompasses western Virginia and North Carolina, almost all of West Virginia and parts of east Tennessee, Kentucky and bits of other places (Missouri would qualify, probably). Now, I know that Appalachia runs north as well — western Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York — but the particular blend of blood-bound attachment to the land and Appalachian Scotch-Irish derived sensibilities is more a uniquely Southern phenomenon, and Kingfisher nails it in The Twisted Ones. Her protagonist, Mouse, describes West Virginia as lots of deep mountain ‘hollers,’ and I guess the etymologists are still fighting over whether the word comes from hollow, which would make sense, or hollerin’, which is a folk-art form where people yodel at one another. p. 7 This is a passage near to my heart, since I live within hollering distance of a couple of hollers. This is the South of woods and suspicion, moonshine and coonhounds, and a cultural slurry of Scotch-Irish folklore, poverty, and suspicion, so I feel it in a way that a reader in, say, LA or Bangor might not, at least not instinctively. However, Kingfisher does such a superb job setting the story — in the case of Mouse (aka Melissa) and her dog Bongo — a 30-minute drive outside of the fictional town of Pondsboro, “which is southwest of Pittsboro, which is northwest of Goldsboro, because nobody in the late 1700s could think of an original name to save their lives” (p. 10). North Carolina’s a weird state, because there are all these roads that are framed by trees, and so you literally do not know how remote the area is. You’re just driving through trees. The woods, once you cut them down, grow up again in a dense tangle of kudzu and buckthorn and honeysuckle and loblolly pines. You can’t see through them. At any given moment, you could be surrounded by a thousand acres of uninhabited woods, or you could be thirty feet from a business park full of IT professionals. p. 10 Pondsboro is a bit to the east of Appalachia, but the vibe is strong. Mostly because, well, a few mild spoilers are in order: Mouse’s step-grandfather, Cotgrave, died about a decade before his wife, Mouse’s evil grandmother (“She was born unkind and graduated to cruel early” (p. 2)) did, leaving Mouse to clean out her house and assess it for possible resale. Oh, and the old woman was a hoarder who left the house two years before her death at 101. Cotgrave had been Welsh, and something followed him from the old country, something he would have preferred to leave behind. Something that comes out of the hills. Mouse reads in Cotgrave’s journal, Sleeping in the woods bad idea, know it, can’t help it. Starting to dream about them. Not like nightmares, but think they’re watching me. They’re close. These hills are full of them, I think. Won’t get too close to her, same way I wouldn’t get close to a dead skunk. Not scared, just don’t like it. But if I sleep outside, then they find me. They must know. Green Book must have left a mark on me. They’re watching. If I had the book, could maybe find the signs to keep them away, but can’t remember now. Poppets made of beeswax and clay? But could be what summons them instead. pp. 59-60 Cotgrave’s journal is full of references to impossible and nonsensical things, things that disturbing and obviously imaginary — until Mouse starts to see and hear them for herself. The first real impossibility are the hills in the woods. There are no hills in the woods near the house. Until there are. It makes a certain sense that creatures from the backwaters of British folklore could inhabit both Wales and Appalachia, given that the mountains in both places were originally part of the same chain, separated by 460 million years but from time to time, close enough to touch, close enough for Mouse and her dog Bongo to stumble into. I know an Appalachian bald when I see one — or at least a bald of some sort. I guess it’s possible I wasn’t in the Appalachians after all, since, as I may have mentioned earlier, this was completely impossible. There aren’t any balds near my grandmother’s house. There aren’t any mountains near my grandmother’s house . . . . There are absolutely, positively, not the sort of hills where you stand on top and gaze over the landscape and see the horizon tinted blue-orange in the distance. I knelt atop the bald and gazed at the blue-orange horizon. p. 80 Once she sees them on the bald, the stones — the carvings and their magic — begin to work on a narrator who most certainly does not want to be worked upon: All the dead are here under the stones. I don’t want you to think that I was being mind-controlled or something. It wasn’t from outside me. It was just the unpleasant little voice that pops up in the middle of the night . . . . Keep walking and you’ll walk out of the sky and down the hill down under the ground among the stones among the dead. . . . p. 89 The white people from Cotgrave’s memory and the Green Book he tries to reproduce are figures straight out of folklore by way to 1900’s eldritch horror. And their poppets are worse. Together they get inside Mouse’s head and drive her to ever-increasing levels of fear, until Foxy steps in with some knowledge and practical coping mechanisms. Foxy, who lives in a defunct commune with Skip and Tomas (another Appalachianism: aging hippies and goths who live-and-let-live), and tells Mouse that it’s not her imagination: They leave stuff around sometimes. Mostly it’s piled-up stones and marks on trees. Talking to each other, like. But sometimes they make something that walks around. p. 165 After seeing one of the “something that walks around,” Mouse is ready to abandon the hoarder-house when Bongo runs off. Foxy fixes Mouse up with some protection that “. . . might help you or might not, but it never hurts to try.” Foxy’s “stuff” was a little velvet bag of herbs and a rosary with round wooden beads. “Got it at the state fair for three dollars,” she said cheerfully. “The roots, though, that’s from a guy down south who said he studied under Doc Buzzard.” “Doc Buzzard?” I asked. “A hoodoo man. He was probably lying, but you never know. “ p. 170 The rosary is not for prayer. No, it’s made of hickory: “It ain’t magic. It’s the other way around. We got hickory over here, but I don’t think they got it over there. You got hickory with you, you got a piece of the world that’s normal. It’s so normal it’ll cancel out some of the weirdness.” p. 170 If a magical object can enchant a normal person, it makes sense that the process would work in the reverse, right? Oh, and Doc Buzzard was a real person who practiced in Beaufort SC, although he appears to have been deeper into voodoo than hoodoo. Anyway, the roots in the bag are also talismanic protections, along with the hickory. How much protection the bundle offers is part of the mystery I’ll not reveal. Foxy’s presence during Mouse’s life-crisis is an Appalachian touchstone. Another age would have called her a cunning woman, a person of power: a woman of a certain age who knows more than she lets on and is fearless in the face of the uncanny. When the white people come calling, it pays to have a good ol’ gal in your corner. Most of the time, horror stutters and the mask slips when the evil is revealed (think Stephen King’s It or Cujo or Christine or . . . I think I’ll stop now). Kingfisher manages to make the reveal terrifying, in no small part because it’s not malicious evil but rather inhumane — indifferent to human motivations and fears. It’s an evil because of its effect on the characters, not because it’s a force of malice. Instead, it’s doing what we all do, it’s trying to survive, and it doesn’t much care about the lives it chews up in the process. For reasons of its own, Appalachia and the holler people reach out to Mouse, whether mistakenly or maliciously. Doesn’t matter. It marks her. Looking back on the last night before she arrives at her grandmother’s house, she remembers staying in a motel: I wish I could remember what that night was like. I think it was the last one where I was standing over here, with you, on the norma side, and not over there, in that other place, with the white people and the stones and the effigies. And Cotgrave, of course. p. 9 Cotgrave, who gets his start in Machen’s “The White People,” has more voice and presence in The Twisted Ones. Kingfisher figures out how to marry his story to the landscape in a particularly Southern fashion. A Southern Appalachian fashion. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/23/2199765/-The-Language-of-the-Night-The-Twisted-Ones-and-Appalachian-Folk-Horror?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/