Dark Pines by Will Dean ( Point Blank)

Dark Pines by Will Dean review – A deaf journalist investigates the case of an eyeless corpse in a promising debut novel set in rural Sweden

A massive forest is the setting for Will Dean’s thriller, ‘which possesses all the necessary Scandi tropes’. Photograph: Alamy

A deep, dank forest, a desperate young Swedish blonde trapped in her vehicle, a belligerent elk bearing down on her…

So far, so Scandi? Dark Pines has all the tropes of the subgenre – gloomy weather (“the pine needles are dark and sodden and the moss is brown and the birches are naked. My dash reads two degrees above zero”), trees, neighbourhood weirdos, and of course elks. The surprise is that it is the debut of British writer Will Dean, who moved to rural Sweden in 2012.

 



The novel stands out for its heroine, Tuva Moodyson, a young deaf woman who works as a reporter for the local paper in the remote town of Gavrik. She’s covering run-of-the-mill stories – “derived from rumour and council minutes and eavesdropping in the local pharmacy” – when a body is found with its eyes missing. Desperate to write a piece that will make her name (“I’ll escape here someday, and I’ll need a portfolio that’ll get me into meetings”), she discovers links to the “Medusa” series of killings that took place in the forest two decades earlier.

The story takes a little too long to get moving, but once it does, it crackles along at a roaring pace

Negotiating a narrow path between the community, who don’t want to see their town portrayed in a bad light, and the truth, Moodyson investigates the residents of Mossen, a tiny gathering of houses in the forest closest to the body. They are all intriguingly strange – there’s the hoarder, the creepy taxi driver, the ghostwriter whom the police are homing in on as a possible killer, and, most bizarre, two sisters who craft their own trolls using real body parts (fingernails, hair).

Moodyson sneaks around, watching through windows and hiding behind trees. She’s terrified by the latter – “A forest the size of an English county, bigger than New York City, the area of an inland fucking sea… I hate the size of it. Doesn’t need to be that big” – and is hampered in the constant rain by her hearing aids, which mustn’t get wet. She might be scared, but she won’t stop, ploughing on despite growing hostility from residents and the increasingly dangerous situations she keeps getting herself into. And then another body turns up…

Dean’s version of rural Sweden is mostly bang-on, although he occasionally overdoes the details (“the three-quarter moon makes the woods as grey as the blood you find under a cooked salmon fillet”). The story takes a little too long to get moving, but once it does, it crackles along at a roaring pace, as Dean piles on sinister locals, hideous troll figures and danger in the dripping wet forest, weaving elements of myth into the tale – at one point his intrepid reporter even ventures into the wood holding the end of a ball of string.

This is intended to be the first in a series, and Moodyson, whose deafness is handled sensitively by Dean, is a character whose progress is worth following.

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