Trolls

   
        

    When I was younger, I used to have a saying: "It's in the past, it can't hurt you any more." The thing is, no matter how much you move on, the past will always be there behind you. It's not a static thing, but a living thing as much as the present, reaching out to touch all your present and future decisions. You can process something, but it'll always linger there, ready to resurface when you least want it to or least expect it. It's what happens when that trigger pops, when that thing comes back to bite you, when the memories finally unlock in the dead of night, that shows you whether you've recovered enough. Whether you've processed enough. Whether or not you're actually on the mend. Trolls by Stefan Spjut and translated by Agnes Broomé is a book about processing the trauma of the past, of how to deal with the horrible things you've seen and done, or had done to you. It might have shape-changing forest monsters and a bleak suspense-thriller plot, it might be one of the darkest and most downbeat horror novels I've ever read, coming forward at a slow and menacing pace as it delves into the depths of its characters' attempts to make sense of the things they've seen and done. It might not be the lurid, gothic horror I'm normally used to, but its psychological slow-burn, some absolutely horrifying scenes (usually involving Stava), some very off-kilter humor, and the way the themes of processing trauma mess me the hell up make it well worth the time to read it and enjoy. 

More, as always, below. 

"They hide inside animals...And you can't be involved with them without being affected by it. You say you don't want to talk about it, and that's exactly it. If they get too close, they burn you up. Mentally. There's no way of telling how that ends."

- Susso Myren

  

                 A pair of researchers find and tranquilize a monstrous wolf, only for the creature to then shift into something else and go off on its own, leaving one of the men dead and the other with a severe mental illness. At the same time, Lennart, a former cult leader who might possibly be over a century old gnaws his own hand off to escape a psychiatric facility and reunites with an odd group of his former followers for some unusual purpose. A strange woman with the power of verbal suggestion finds her way into the researcher's broken home. And Susso Myrén, a former cryptozoology enthusiast living in self-imposed exile after a brush with Lennart's cult left her traumatized and disillusioned, is forced to confront further horrors as Lennart's followers close in just as her childhood friend Diana comes looking for her. 

And then things get weird.

Spread throughout these various groups are a variety of odd, shapeshifting forestdwellers with unclear motives: A squirrel who seems highly protective of Susso, mice who incite people to violence, a homicidal wolf-creature who wears the faces of others like masks. All of them are drawn towards the small village of Runarjavi for some unknown purpose, leaving a swath of broken minds and bodies in their wake. But while they and the cult might be an immediate threat, the further psychic toll on their victims might be the thing that truly destroys them all. 

I don't get to use the word "Lynchian" often enough to describe things. It's kind of an overused term in the criticism world, usually reserved for when someone puts a dwarf in a dream sequence or tries inexpertly to blend pastoral suburbia with dark surrealism. But that's not the essence of the thing. Stefan Spjut, by dint of keeping his supernatural elements shadowy, his focus on the wrenching human drama and suspense elements at the fore, and by working in elements of dark, off-kilter humor throughout, has actually created something Lynchian. Trolls feels eerie, even when there's nothing supernatural going on. There's enough wrong, enough menace lurking just at the edges of the book's events, that even the lighter and quieter scenes feel like there's something definitely wrong going on. The shapeshifters themselves feel weirdly alien, too. Few of them speak, their motives are unclear other than messing with humans, and even when the squirrel is protecting Susso, he doesn't feel particularly benevolent. It's a shock when there actually is an unambiguously benevolent creature, though the scene is still unnerving enough to sit weird. That alienness, that idea that the supernatural elements harm simply by being, is almost as horrifying as anything else the book can possibly serve up. It's terrifying to imagine that something's presence, even if you can't see it, will still affect you in massive ways. That these alien forces are constantly at work on your life. It'd almost be a cosmic horror premise, except it feels wrong to affix the cosmic or existential label to something so old and supernatural. It isn't the universe, it's that these things have existed and operated for longer than humans have, and have their own ways and methods. 

But while all of that is in play and comes through in the book, the actual supernatural and violent events are used sparingly, gruesome sequences revealing themselves with dawning horror as the plot moves ever forward, as slow and methodical as a slasher movie villain pursuing their victims. Trolls is a subdued book if anything, its more violent sections sudden and jarring shifts against the usually foreboding and downbeat nature. It plays well enough for the themes, though. This isn't a book about nasty people doing horrible things, it's about dealing with the aftermath of horrible things happening. Diana's left a wreck after Susso's captors torture her, but she tries her best to keep it together and seek closure for what happened. Her husband, meanwhile, completely falls apart and is prone to emotional outbursts after he encounters one of the mice, unable to deal with the guilt of what he'd done. The horror of the book comes mainly from these reactions and the further psychological manipulations of the trolls, the idea that one day something will come along and completely wipe out any sense of normal you have, that the world will keep going, but you'll be warped in some way and unable to adequately explain why. It's one of the very few really affecting and realistic portrayals of trauma in fiction, one that doesn't descend into histrionics, and I wish more people would portray this approach rather than the more heightened examples found elsewhere. 

It's not all dark, though. Well, at least, it's not all dark and dramatic. There are some flashes of black humor that run through the work, whether it's the way the trolls around Lennart tend to...fail at being human (one decides to act more human by ripping off the face of an associate and wearing it like a mask. For the rest of the book, they just call him "Erasmus," the name of the man whose face he stole), the absurd juxtaposition of Hakan's violent search for a mouse, which makes sense in context but looks completely insane out of context, or the entire body-disposal scene, which turns into an argument about potatoes and finally involves two "helpers" Susso's mother's partner Roland employs for a variety of jobs (in fact, any time Roland and his easygoing weirdness is on the page, it's kind of a lighter time). It helps keep the tone from being completely grim, which is good, because processing that much trauma and horror over the course of four hundred pages would be brutal otherwise, and the humor never gets to the point of whiplash, adding a sardonic edge without overwhelming the darker nature of the book. 

There are some things to keep in mind about Trolls, however. It does deal with some very dark subjects, including abuse, torture, toxic relationships, and some truly unsettling sequences involving murder, kidnapping, and other horrifying incidents. It doesn't pull its punches, and the internal monologues of the (willing or otherwise) participants only add to the feeling of dread. Its ruthlessness is only matched by its slow-burn pacing. It is not a book that rushes to get anywhere, but one that trudges relentlessly forward. If you're not prepared for a heavy slow-burn of a book, this is going to be a problem, and if you're expecting the usual kind of supernatural horror instead of horrifying supernatural folk-horror weirdness and Lynchian psychological suspense, then this might not be the book for you.

This is, of course, all academic. The book is very much what it is, and it's uncompromising in that. It's a deep, slow-burning, heavily psychological and surreal horror novel that'll hit you as hard and as deep as any extreme/hardcore horror volume without any of the gallons of bodily fluids that all those novels seem to want to sling around. Trolls is excellent, a very Scandinavian, very horrifying Scandinavian horror novel, dark and forbidding as the forests in which it's set. Stefan Spjut is incredible at building some absolutely wrenching psychological stakes, and when the cathartic moments finally come, they're every bit as hard-hitting as the buildup. While it's not for everyone, Trolls is at least worth checking out to see if it's for you. 

Geek Rage/Strange Library was sent a copy of this book in exchange for a review. Thanks to the good folks at Faber and Faber for allowing me the chance to get back in the saddle and write this, hopefully it's as fun to read as it was to write.