“I could help you, but I’d rather stand here and record.”

70. The Lost Village – Camilla Sten

This book has some of the elements I like best – it’s a tight setting, there aren’t millions of characters and perspectives to consider in one chapter, it’s just these people and the missing people, all in the same location and dealing with the creepy circumstances happening in the past and the present. And mold. And injuries. And the haunting spectre of the past. And before anyone can even haunt anything, a handsome stranger priest shows up and then suddenly no one is in the town of Silvertjarn anymore.

Sten mentions in her notes that the book is also dealing with different women’s experience of mental illness – including one who cannot tell her own story and is a target of that handsome stranger priest in the past. This was also a very appealing aspect to me, as I find a lot of horror in group mentalities and targeting women who aren’t like everyone else, regardless of whether it’s being done out of ignorance or because you want to be a member of the cult in good standing.

I can say that this did not scare me anywhere near as much as The Blair Witch Project did when it came out and I saw it in the theater; however, I like the conceit of making a documentary about an isolated and mysterious location and having things go horribly wrong and that’s done well here and in an interesting way. There’s also the parallel of outsider women being the easiest targets to accuse of witchcraft, which is always a challenge to the Christianity of the villagers, going on in The Lost Village and Blair Witch (although that movie really indicates they were right to be worried about her).

Also, as someone who has read a lot of Scandinavian and Nordic crime novels, I really appreciate having some of that area’s horror. There isn’t enough of it getting translated as far as I can tell, I would like some more.

Pere had a habit of facing the corners of her house and every time I saw it I would ask her not to Blair Witch because it’s too scary. Here, Horace has convinced her to face away from the couch corner, a marked improvement.