"Himmelstrand" is the first part of the" Trilogy of Places "from the Swedish master of mystery novels and horror Jon Avide Lindqvist, known for the work"Let me in". I started reading the book on the recommendation of Galina Yuzefovich, to be honest, I would never have paid attention to it myself, because the series "Masters of Horror" is something completely passing by. To be honest, I did not understand how the novel hooked the most popular book reviewer of our country, because I had passed his clingers, but I can't call this text bad either.
The novel begins with the fact that eight adults, two children, a dog and a cat who are on vacation in a camping park wake up one morning in some incomprehensible place, in which there is only the earth with a grass and a blue sky above their heads.
Their trailers are marked with red crosses, the navigator shows that they are still located in the same place as yesterday, but attempts to scout the area lead to absolutely nothing: wherever you go, the same landscapes and the same horizon are everywhere, and only Peter Himmelstrand's songs are on the radio.
About half of the novel (it is 570 pages in total) is a description of the characters through actions and the constantly arising question "what the hell is going on here?". In "Himmelstrand" there is a typical set of characters for a hermetic work, in which very different characters face the same problem and try to somehow solve it together without devouring and tearing each other apart.
Some are cute, others are showing off, others are just not very good, the fourth are whiny rags... in general, Lindquist bypassed only the cat, about which we do not know anything at all, although separate chapters are devoted to the dog. Everyone, of course, has some skeletons in the closet, their toys in the hut, fears, missed opportunities, etc., which we will certainly learn about.
The second half is already more dynamic, because it turns out that the ten comrades already familiar to us in this world of a perfectly flat lawn do not live alone at all, but it is better not to encounter other inhabitants, otherwise the water supply is limited and there is nowhere to wash their pants.
However, despite the increase in the volume of mysticism, the author's focus always remains on the characters and their relationships, it seems that there could not have been any monsters in the work at all, all the same, this ten would not have ended with anything good.
The action in the novel develops very slowly, sometimes a hundred pages do not develop at all: cinnamon rolls are made, someone indulges in memories, one heroine looks at Pascal's" Martyrs " at all, probably to raise the spirit. So it seems that Lindqvist is not in a hurry at all, he has his whole life ahead of him, so the reader can also quite slow down and feel the atmosphere of a continuous mystery.
The whole "Himmelstrand" is less than one day in the life of the characters, it seems to me that the book ended before they had an evening there. At some point, I began to understand that there is nothing left until the end of the book, and the author, in general, did not answer any questions about the world in which the heroes got and the reasons why they were in this world. I will say more, he did not answer them in principle, most likely, he was not even going to, so if you are from the category of readers who simply need the author to sort everything out, this book is not for you.
Nowadays it is not comme il faut to write or shoot a horror story in which monsters will just be monsters, there should be some kind of metaphor behind everything so that the reader can shift the mysticism and horrors to ordinary life. "Himmelstrand" is by no means an innovation in terms of ideas, Lindqvist tells his reader about unprocessed psychotraumas, suppressed childhood fears and unspoken desires that can come out in an instant and become flesh and blood.
They will feed on you in every sense of the expression, they will look as you imagine them to yourself, and of course only you can defeat them. Not everyone can challenge their fears, some go on about them, others prefer to fold their paws and pretend to be a corpse, because they no longer believe in anything good and do not expect anything good.
So Lindqvist's heroes do not become a team, there is no united front, on the contrary, they interact less and less, going either into themselves or into family problems. The moral of this fable is this: if you do not share your fears with your loved ones, they will not be able to understand what scares you, and will not help you overcome this fear.
In my opinion, this is somewhat doubtful: it seems that the idea that dragging your cargo alone is terrible when there is a person who is ready to help you only out of love and in exchange for sharing his cargo is quite reasonable in itself, but within the framework of the shown world and strange/scary images, it looks somehow... not great.
For me, "Himmelstrand" fell into the category of books "you can pass by without losing anything, but after reading it, you will not spit". The book was easy to read, it was interesting, but now it ended and... nothing. Neither the mind nor the heart.
On the one hand, it is interesting, of course, what kind of non-existence is with the lawn, I have a hope that when the whole trilogy is read, everything will either be explained or it will simply become unimportant, on the other, I will definitely not wait for the continuation with burning eyes. I will read it if it is released and I will not forget about the "Trilogy of the Place" by that time, well, there is no trial, as they say.
I advise those who are interested in the plot of the novel and are ready for the fact that the reader will not receive answers to his questions. Well, and to the fact that the second and third parts of the cycle are not yet in Russian, and there is no exact certainty that they will be.
746.097 SRY