The Twisted Ones Kingfisher

The Twisted Ones

Award-winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher, presents a terrifying tale of hidden worlds and monstrous creations... When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be? Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there's more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather's journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants...until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself. Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they're looking for you. And if she doesn't face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.

Kingfisherish Wandering

I once asked myself what freedom truly is. For a time, I lived without purpose, trying to avoid a fixed mind and letting life drift as it would. I even believed that was Laozi’s wu wei way of living—until I had the fortune to work with Professor Vuong Quan Hoang, enjoying his fiction title Wild Wise Weird. It is precisely these absurdities of Kingfisher that have given me precious moments of self-reflection. Through them, when I look back at my earlier phase of aimless, spontaneous living—which I once mistook for wu wei—I now see it as an illusion. It was like dreaming myself a butterfly like Zhuangzi, but never waking myself up. Zhuangzi is often called the philosopher of uncertainty, while Kingfisher is the philosopher of absurdity. If the two were to meet and converse, what a fascinating dialogue that would be! Even though Prof. Hoang no longer intends to continue the story series, my curiosity compels me to imagine what would happen if Kingfisher were to meet Master Zhuang. With his kind permission, I have taken the liberty of sending Kingfisher back to the Warring States era, to wander and converse with Zhuangzi—to see, after all, how absurdity and uncertainty differ, and how they might be one. That is the reason this book is named Kingfisherish Wandering. Minh-Hoang Nguyen October 10, 2025 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia