The Twisted Ones

“Every time I went over there, she was snipping at him—snip, snip, snip, like her tongue was pruning shears and she was slicing off bits for fun.”

This quote uses a simile and onomatopoeia to characterize the narrator’s grandmother and introduce the theme of The Unsettling Inheritance of Family Trauma. The repetition of “snip” creates an auditory image of relentless, casual cruelty, while the comparison of the grandmother’s tongue to “pruning shears” portrays her verbal abuse as a physically destructive act. By framing the abuse as something she did “for fun,” the text establishes her malice as a foundational element of the family dynamic, predating any supernatural horror.

“It’s in my head again, like a song that keeps replaying. […] I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.”

This passage from Cotgrave’s journal introduces the novel’s central, dangerous litany. Cotgrave’s comparison of the phrase to an earworm establishes the text as a type of memetic hazard, capable of infecting the reader’s mind. This introduces the theme of The Double-Edged Power of Narrative, suggesting that the very words used to describe the horror are themselves a vector for it.

“She had that power, though. They didn’t come around her. Needed that. Didn’t realize what she was like.”

Pulled from Cotgrave’s journal, this entry explains his motivation for marrying the grandmother: Her malevolence served as a supernatural repellent. The ambiguity of “they” creates a sense of a pervasive, unnamed threat held at bay by human cruelty.