Searching for Ghosts of the Past Can Be Deadly (The Lost Village suspense review)

As much as I love crafting (and imbibing, just so we’re clear, here) a delightfully-complex cocktail, there’s also much to be said for the beautiful simplicity of something like a G&T, which creates its own magic with just three meager ingredients.

The same holds true—for me, anyway—with storytelling; while I’m all for becoming completely ensnared by a labyrinthine tale [when done well, mind you—I enjoy crappy stories no more than I do crappy drinks], there’s an undeniable power to a simpler story, when told really, really well… which is exactly what Camilla Sten manages to do in her unputdownable new suspense, The Lost Village.

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Alice Lindstedt has had two passions for as long as she can remember: making movies (hence her film school degree), and trying to solve a fifty-plus-year-old family mystery (the inexplicable disappearance of an entire Swedish village—including her grandmother’s whole family—back in 1959). 

When—by chance, as much as anything—she meets another person with ties to that long-ago mass vanishing, Alice decides it’s now or never to go all in on her obsessions: she aims to film a documentary about the tiny town of Silvertjärn, and—with any luck—also (finally) unearth the secret to how (and why) 900 people could simply go “poof!”.

But independent filmmaking has its own unique set of challenges—money being chief among them—so Alice enlists the aid of a tiny crew to go spend a long weekend with her in the remote ghost town, to shoot a brief—and hopefully compelling—pitch film they can use in a Kickstarter campaign, to pay for doing the full documentary via crowdfunding.

From the first moment Alice and her four-person crew arrive on the outskirts of Silvertjärn, though, things start to go sideways. First, the supposedly-stable bridge [the only way to cross the river to the town being via one of two ancient bridges] has rotted away, leaving the unstable one their sole remaining option. 

The same rot extends into town, they soon discover… making stairs in all the vacant houses and other buildings—the very places they need to explore and shoot in—fraught with inherent danger. 

There are strange sounds. On separate occasions, a couple of members of the team are convinced they’re being watched. Everywhere they turn, each house they explore, leaves them with a sense of mounting despair, doubt, and unease. Silvertjärn, if it ever was, is most definitely not a place of happy memories, any more.

And then, a freak occurrence leaves Alice and her friends without means of leaving… which turns out to be precisely the one thing they desperately want to do, once the horrific realities of Silvertjärn’s legacy are revealed. But will the ghosts of Silvertjärn even let them--and the secrets they've unearthed--leave? That becomes the increasingly terrifying question. 

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Having been a producer, myself, on a couple of independent, crowdfunded films, I was immediately drawn to The Lost Village, because that whole world is one few people really understand. (The inevitable comparisons to both The Blair Witch Project and Midsommar—both memorable films in their own rights—didn’t hurt, either.)

By alternating between the present—with Alice and her team—and the past—providing sense of the lives of residents circa 1959—Sten creates two very different visions of the same village for us to be fascinated by… then slowly, subtly brings them ever closer together. There's a strong sense of time and space along an exceedingly-finite continuum, as the tale unfolds, and it’s highly effective at building a mounting suspense.

With so few characters [even when going back to the past, Sten’s focus is on a pretty small group of townsfolk], it might seem the mystery would lag or the suspense dwindle, but I found the opposite to be true; the tension escalated the nearer I got to the end… to the point that probably nothing could’ve made me set the book down until I’d reached the last page.

The Lost Village is a great read… even if I’ll be sure to leave towns like Silvertjärn off my bucket list when I eventually get to visit Sweden. As for Sten, I’ll be keeping an eager eye open for her next book. 

~GlamKitty