⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Overall rating
🦇🦇🦇 Disturbing
🔴 Not Animal Safe 👻 Spooky Witness ⚠️ Pet Peril
🩸🩸 Moderate and🩸🩸🩸 Heavy for Wolf Worm
👻 Supernatural, 🌲 Folk Horror, 📖 Gothic Horror
While I admire T. Kingfisher’s strong characters, friendships, and unsettling supernatural scenarios, readers concerned about animal harm should approach these stories with caution.
Some horror authors terrify readers with violence.
Others terrify us with ideas.
T. Kingfisher belongs firmly in the second category.
Her stories often begin with ordinary people living ordinary lives… until something deeply wrong creeps into the edges of their world.
A strange hole in a museum wall.
A forgotten path in the woods.
A whisper from somewhere that shouldn’t exist.
A scientific project that should never have gone beyond the page.
Before long, the characters — and the reader — realise they have stumbled into something ancient, unsettling, and impossible to explain.
And somehow, it is both terrifying and oddly comforting at the same time.
A Master of Modern Folk Horror
Kingfisher’s horror frequently draws on folk horror, gothic horror and cosmic horror traditions, but she adds something many writers forget:
Warmth and humour.
Her protagonists are not hardened investigators or fearless heroes. Instead, they are often practical, slightly sarcastic adults who find themselves confronting the uncanny whether they like it or not.
This grounded perspective makes the horror feel even more believable.
When something impossible appears, the characters react the way real people might:
“This is horrifying… but I guess we should investigate.”
The Hollow Places – One of My Favourite Horror Novels
The Hollow Places is one of my favourite horror books in recent years.
The story follows Kara, who returns to her uncle’s unusual roadside museum after her life unexpectedly falls apart. While exploring the building, she discovers a hole in the wall that leads somewhere impossible.
On the other side lies a strange landscape that feels wrong, silent, vast, and deeply hostile to human beings.
The tension builds slowly as Kara and her friend Simon realise that the place they have discovered should not exist — and it may not want them to leave.
What makes the novel particularly memorable isn’t just the unsettling setting.
It’s the characters.
Kara and Simon feel like real people navigating something far beyond their understanding, balancing fear with humour in a way that feels genuinely human.
The result is a story that is deeply unsettling while still being surprisingly companionable to read.
The Twisted Ones – Folk Horror at Its Best
The Twisted Ones leans even further into folk horror.
When Mouse agrees to clean out her late grandmother’s rural home, she expects clutter and old belongings.
What she doesn’t expect is a journal describing strange creatures that live in the surrounding woods.
Creatures that may still be there.
As Mouse begins exploring the forest around the house, she slowly realises that something ancient may be watching from just beyond the trees.
And the woods are not as empty as they seem.
The novel captures the unsettling feeling that something is always just out of sight, quietly observing.
I also appreciated the diverse supporting characters in The Twisted Ones, including people of colour who feel capable, intelligent and important to the story rather than simply existing in the background.
Wolf Worm – Gothic Horror with Too Many Legs
Wolf Worm adds a different flavour to Kingfisher’s horror: historical gothic, scientific obsession, and insects.
So many insects.
Set in 1899, the novel follows Sonia Wilson, a scientific illustrator who takes work with an entomologist in North Carolina. Sonia is a strong main character: brave, observant, and focused on her career in a way that makes her feel quite modern, despite the historical setting.
I enjoyed that aspect of her character. Sonia is not simply waiting for life to happen to her. She is trying to build a future for herself in a world that gives women very limited room to do that.
The horror itself is vivid and often deeply uncomfortable. Kingfisher has a gift for making nature feel strange, invasive and wrong, and Wolf Worm takes that unease in an especially bug-heavy direction. As someone who lives in Australia and already feels personally terrorised by insects every summer, this was not exactly a relaxing reading experience.
The gore is also stronger here than in The Hollow Places or The Twisted Ones. My mind is very visual, so some scenes were difficult to shake off.
For Fear in Flight readers, this is also one to approach with caution if animal harm is a concern. There is harm to small animals, including rabbits, which I found sad and upsetting. The Kent family’s dog, however, has a memorable role and unknowingly helps Miss Wilson, which added a small but welcome animal-safe moment in an otherwise very unsettling story.
One thing that frustrated me was Sonia’s decision to ignore what she saw in the shed. It made sense that she was constrained by the expectations of the time, and worried about how others would react, but as a reader I wanted her to trust herself sooner. Still, that tension also reflects one of Kingfisher’s recurring strengths: her characters often make imperfect, human decisions under pressure.
And sometimes the scariest part is watching someone realise that their instincts were right all along.
Representation and Strong Friendships
Another element I appreciate in Kingfisher’s horror is the way her stories highlight friendship and community.
Many horror stories focus heavily on isolation, but Kingfisher often allows her characters to confront the unknown together.
In The Hollow Places, the friendship between Kara and Simon is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Simon provides positive LGBTQIA+ representation, and while the portrayal leans slightly toward familiar stereotypes, it still feels warm, supportive and respectful.
Their friendship brings humour and humanity to a story that explores some deeply unsettling ideas.
What stands out most is that Kingfisher’s characters are not defined solely by identity markers. Instead, they feel like real people navigating increasingly strange and dangerous situations together.
In stories filled with cosmic dread, strange woods, impossible landscapes and suspiciously active insect collections, these relationships provide an emotional anchor for the reader.
Why T. Kingfisher’s Horror Works
What makes Kingfisher stand out in modern horror is the balance she strikes between supernatural terror and emotional warmth.
Across The Hollow Places, The Twisted Ones and Wolf Worm, her stories often combine:
cosmic dread
folk horror
gothic atmosphere
personal tragedy
strong friendships
dry humour
likeable characters you want to win
Her characters are rarely blank victims wandering into danger. They have histories, grief, frustrations, responsibilities and relationships. They are funny, flawed and practical, which makes them feel human even when the world around them becomes impossible.
That emotional grounding matters. The strange doorway, the watching woods and the insect horror are frightening on their own, but they become more powerful because Kingfisher gives us characters worth caring about.
The horror creeps in slowly — and once it arrives, it tends to linger long after the final page.
Final Thoughts
Horror doesn’t always need relentless darkness to be effective.
Sometimes the most unsettling stories are the ones that balance dread with humour, warmth and believable characters.
That’s exactly what T. Kingfisher achieves across The Hollow Places, The Twisted Ones and Wolf Worm.
Her characters feel like people you might genuinely know: practical, slightly sarcastic, flawed, and doing their best to survive situations no one could ever truly be prepared for. The strong friendships, thoughtful representation and moments of humour give the stories emotional depth, which ultimately makes the creeping horror even more effective.
For me, The Hollow Places remains the standout. The eerie landscapes, the sense that something vast and wrong is lurking just out of sight, and the believable friendship between Kara and Simon combine to create a story that lingers long after the final page.
Wolf Worm was more grotesque and bug-heavy than my personal comfort zone, but it also confirmed Kingfisher’s skill at creating vivid, unsettling scenarios with memorable protagonists.
If you enjoy horror that blends cosmic unease, folklore, gothic atmosphere, humour and strong character relationships, T. Kingfisher is absolutely an author worth exploring.
Just be prepared to think twice the next time you see a strange doorway, a quiet forest path, a hole in the wall that shouldn’t be there…
Or far too many bugs.
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