Just as I was about to give up on modern Swedish fiction (and read only foreign books and Selma Lagerlöf in the future) I found a book really worth reading. Given my abysmal hit rate thus far, I expect I will find another readable one some time next summer.

Människohamn (“Human harbour”) begins on a beautiful, crisp winter day. On a small island in Stockholm’s archipelago, Anders, Cecilia and their six-year-old daughter Maja decide to take a walk over the ice, out to the lighthouse. But once they’re there, Maja disappears, even though there’s nowhere to go. Her tracks stop in the middle of the snow.

Two years later, Anders returns to the island, alone and alcoholized, and still obsessed with Maja’s disappearance. Out in their cabin, he sees things that seem to tell him that somehow Maja is still around.

Here the story starts to grow and spread, both backwards and forwards in time, and pulls in more people. At various points the main story thread pauses for a digression into the past, which then wraps up and smoothly directs us back into the main story. It turns into a family saga and a local history. (There’s an old Swedish tradition of skärgårdsroman, “archipelago novels”, dating back to Strindberg in the 1800s.)

It appears that Maja is far from the first person to disappear like that, and that some of them may indeed still be present even though they’re gone. And some of them are not entirely benevolent towards the living.

Just like Låt den rätte komma in, Människohamn makes for a great horror book because it blends the supernatural into the everyday so discreetly that it barely stands out and seems to belong there. His undead drive mopeds and quote 1970s pop music. As a result it seems quite believable that an evil force might be in residence somewhere out there in the sea. Only the ending is a bit too turgid, too much Lovecraftian “nameless evil from the abyss”.

I’d recommend this book to you even if you wouldn’t normally choose to read a horror story. Lindqvist is a great writer and Människohamn is a joy to read. The phrases flow effortlessly, the descriptions are evocative, the moods are wonderfully moody, the dialogue is lively and unforced.