Anders Fager’s creeping, ichor-sticky collection, Swedish Cults, begins with a story about, well… a cult. But it’s the kind of cult action I absolutely love, in which there is no great fanfare about all this ritual business, and the cult itself sits almost comfortably in plain sight, a set of practices and traditions that everyone in a community more or less acknowledges as having always been there. “The Furies of Boras” sees a modern set of teenage girls out at a dancehall, at a place where there has always been dancing, and as perennial as teenage girl politics and concerns, as perennial as the dancing, is the thing in the bog waiting for its due.

“Anna closes her eyes, sees primeval swamps behind her eyelids. Swamps and rain and kisses. The Pussycat Dolls’ ‘Don’t Cha’ blares through the speakers. Sofie scans the place. She’s thinking about her history project. There’s a lot going on in your head your final year. Industrialism in the Vastergotland region and bogs and kisses. … Stares at the girls and stares at a telephone pole of a tentacle less than a meter from her forehead. A twitch and she’s dead. Not much fun. And on top of everything she has an essay to hand in.”

All of Fager’s stories have this matter-of-factness, a sense of brains skipping a beat when forced up against the incomprehensible, sliding over hysteria and protest directly into a kind of shock of acceptance. There is something indelibly human about a high schooler in a cannibalistic orgy, watching the lumbering, eldritch swamp-beast she and her cohorts are petitioning, worrying about a history essay she has to write. Such a detail might seem farcical in the hands of a less-keen observer, but Fager knows how to fit the mundane against the outlandish pretty seamlessly.¹ His Lovecraftian horrors are glimpsed rather than belabored, appearing obliquely in conversations between two old friends, in the subtle changes in a boyfriend returning from abroad, in a name uttered into the winter air. In his precisely-drawn characters, appearing as sharp as miniatures in the brief space they occupy, we feel lives proceeding mostly normally until, inexorably, they slip into the uncanny; as with Laird Barron’s horror fiction, much of the impact of Fager’s work lies in this dread as things slip away from the familiar with no hope of getting back to the right path.

Valancourt Press, which published this for American audiences, has been doing a lot for weird fiction both vintage and contemporary; their republishing of many of the luridly great titles featured in Grady Hendrix’s delightful Paperbacks from Hell is a tremendous service to an all-too-ephemeral age of horror fiction. I’m really looking forward to checking out many more of their offerings based on the strength of this title alone. 

1. Definitely to be credited here, too, are his very capable translators, Ian Lemke and Henning Koch. ↩︎