Today Cassie recommends The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated by Alexandra Fleming. We hope you'll check it out!
The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated by Alexandra Fleming
"The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense.
Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.
But there will be no turning back.
Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:
They are not alone.
They’re looking for the truth…
But what if it finds them first?"
Cassie's Review
“Recovered, in recovery, or struggling, we are still people. Sometimes that truth can feel like a fever dream.”
What is it about lost villages or colonies that's so intriguing? From Roanoke and beyond, the idea of a group of people mysteriously vanishing without a trace or cause is so unsettling that when I know it's a theme being explored in books or movies, I rush to them first.
Another theme or trope I really enjoy are film crews going to spooky locales with the intention of making a movie or uncovering some sort of mystery - it always leads to bad stuff happening, but these folks keep doing it anyway!
This one is a combination of the two things I love in horror, which is why I knew I had to read it right away. Originally written in Swedish, The Lost Village follows Alice, a documentarian determined to uncover the secrets of the old mining town from which her grandmother's family and almost all of the rest of the town's residents disappeared.
The atmosphere is steeped in spooky dread and creepy vibes, and I felt like I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen to Alice and the rest of her crew members next. It doesn't take long after starting the story to get into the scary stuff, which continues to ramp up until the very end!
This one has a lot of themes of mental illness (not always handled in a positive way), so I definitely recommend looking into the content warnings if you find that you might need them.
Thank you for joining us today! Please share your thoughts in the comments about The Lost Village and/or any recent reads you've been enjoying.
We are currently accepting horror fiction and horror adjacent fiction written by diverse authors in print and epub format ONLY. If this is you, please visit our review submission page here.
No comments:
Post a Comment