The Darkest Room

A Hauntingly Gothic Scandinavian Crime Drama

The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin was a bestseller in Sweden and won the 2009 Glass Key award for the best Nordic Crime Novel. It was also awarded the 2010 CWA International Dagger after its translation into English.

The critics said it was “impossible to reduce … to a ghost story, a police procedural or a gothic tale”.

It captivated me.

Synopsis

Katrine and Joakim Westin sell their house in Stockholm and move with their young family to live the rural dream. They buy an old, run-down, reputedly haunted wooden manor house on the coast at Eel point on the Swedish holiday Island of Öland.

Winter has drawn in, and all the summer visitors have long since gone. They left behind them cold, barren, deserted villages where the holiday homes are easy prey for burglars.

A disaster befalls the Westin family when one of them falls into the sea, only meters from their new home and drowns. Distraught, Joakim confronts the reality that there was more to his escape to the country than he’d care to admit, and memories of the life he left in Stockholm start to haunt him.

Then on Christmas Eve, the darkest night of the year, a blizzard sets in and the manor at Eel Point receives unwelcome visitors.

Review

Originally published in Sweden as Nattfåk (roughly Night Blizzard), it is easy to understand why The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin won so many plaudits. It is eerily atmospheric, with a plot that plays out across genres, part police procedural and part gothic ghost story. All set on the desolate landscape of a Baltic island during the long Scandinavian winter nights.

The plot revolves around an ancient manor house. It was built initially for Swedish lighthouse keepers with timbers reclaimed from a shipwreck in the Baltic sea. The manor house has been beset with a series of tragedies. Its new inhabitants bring a tragedy of their own, reinforcing the sense that the house is somehow possessed.

Theorin overlays this gothic mood with a modern police procedural. It features a young policewoman determined to make her way and three young vandals who loot and burgle holiday homes.

The resulting novel is hard to buttonhole. It is neither a fairy tale nor a crime novel and will have you guessing right the way to the end if it will have a paranormal or earthly outcome.

The introduction to the book starts with a warning:

Isolated by the snow, Joakim is unaware that visitors – as unwelcome as they are terrifying – are making their way towards him.

For this is the darkest night of the year, the night when the living meet the dead …

At this point, you might be thinking of the start of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but Theorin is far less cack-handed than that. The ghost story is very subtle; a little girl talks in her sleep, and the wooden house creaks in the wind.

Is it supernatural? You will have to read it and find out.

Excerpt

Torun doesn’t come back. At first I am angry with her, then I start to feel afraid. I have never seen so much snow whirling past the windows. The flakes are not falling, they are slicing through the air. The wind shakes the windowpanes.

Half an hour or so after the storm begins, a small figure finally appears, ploughing through the snowdrifts in the inner courtyard. I hurry outside, grab hold of Torun before she collapses and help her inside, to the fire.

The bag is still hanging over her shoulder, but the easel has been swept away in the storm. Her eyes are swollen shut; grains of ice mixed with sand have blown into them, and she can hardly see. When I take off her clothes they are soaked; she is frozen stiff.

She had been sitting painting on the far side of the peat bog, Offermossen, when the clouds gathered and the storm came. She tried to take a short cut through the tussocks of grass and the thin ice of the bog, but fell into the water and had to fight her way on to firmer ground. She whispers, ‘The dead came up out of the bog … lots of them, clawing at me, ripping and tearing … they were cold, so cold. They wanted my warmth.’

Torun is rambling. I get her to drink some hot tea and put her to bed.

The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin