I’m looking at the average rating on this book and I’m perplexed, because this is one of the best horror novels I’ve read in quite some time. It has everything I love about horror novels in this genre with the added joy of possessing several layers of social and cultural commentary that have me itching to deconstruct the whole story down to its bones. 

I’m not kidding: In between devouring the pages with greedy eyes, I was humming in delight at the implacable dread that saturated every page and the way this story moves like a runaway train and you know the wreck at the end is going to be calamitous. I was eager to know who was finally going to be the one to f*ck around and find out (because of course someone was going to). I was wiggling my toes as I laughed darkly at the townspeople and their naive, foolish, and futile endeavors. The story was deep, black, bleak, and absolutely right up my alley. 

I love Scandinavian horror. For some reason I was utterly fascinated (at first) as to why Olde Heuvelt chose to write a story set in upstate New York in his native Dutch, but then I discovered the original story Heuvelt wrote (before he sold the rights to the US translation) had the story set in a small village in the Netherlands. Talk about a change in location! Heuvelt and the translator worked sublimely together, though, to bring the original story over to the US and weave this story into something wholly engrossing, entertaining, and wicked.