When I heard this book was a mix of The Blair Witch Project and Midsommar, I was immediately intrigued! A documentary film crew is scouting their future filming location-an abandoned mining village where all of the residents disappeared one day and were never seen or heard from again. As soon as the crew arrives, they get the feeling they are not alone. Then strange things begin to happen-equipment is destroyed, people are missing, and the crew keeps seeing a mysterious figure.

The Lost Village definitely held my attention. I was immediately intrigued and finished the book within a couple of days because I needed to know what was going on. I was really hoping for more creepy scenes-there just wasn't enough of that for me, especially given the comparison to The Blair Witch Project. Overall I felt like the ending was satisfying and pretty much the only way things could have gone. I was hoping for a better explanation for why the villagers disappeared, but again, I'm not sure what other explanation there could have been.

Many thanks to the publisher for an advance reading copy of this title in exchange for my honest review.

In 1959, the 900 people of the village of Silvertjarn disappeared from their small mining town leaving behind only two members of the community, one dead, the other a newborn baby. Alice Lindstedt, descended from a former daughter of the village, has put together a crew on a shoestring budget to create an introductory film to gain sponsorship for the documentary she plans to make about this “lost village.” Of course, solving the mystery would be a wonderful dividend.

The novel definitely kept my attention and I enjoyed the careful use of split narrative between “Now,” the present day story, and “Then,” what was happening in Silvertjarn during 1959 as told by Alice’s great grandmother. The device was used when it was needed. There was a feeling of dread from the moment of the group’s arrival at the outskirts of the village and it persists throughout the story, ebbing and flowing with the action. I do enjoy novels that can deliver that feeling through characterization and action more than gore.

Recommended for those who enjoy suspenseful storytelling, thriller with horror tinges.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

The title pulled me in and the book description hooked me—a village of almost 900 people, gone. What happened?

The granddaughter of a woman who had left well before the strange disappearances is pulled back to the village. She plans to do a documentary and is accompanied by friends, old and new. But things go wrong almost immediately. The story unfolds through present-day scenes and past scenes focusing on the narrator’s great-grandmother.

I enjoyed the author’s prose. She wrote with restraint but knew when to let go. Quiet moments quickly became loud moments, and when that happened, I couldn’t look away. The opening chapter! That final Birgitta scene! Wow. The creepy atmosphere was done just right.

I’m giving this one a 3/3.5 because I wasn’t convinced that the Emmy and Alice subplot and the Emmy and Max subplot were necessary to the story. The tension in the former relationship felt odd/off, then that moment of forgiveness didn’t feel earned. This storyline also interfered with Alice’s character development; I wanted to learn a bit more about her and her grandma’s relationship. A bit more about Alice, actually. I also wasn’t surprised by what we learned about the pastor, but the author used him well in the story.

I really enjoyed this creepy story. The story had a very interesting seemingly paranormal feeling but didn't actually turn out to be paranormal at all. The dual timeline for the different families was done very well. I never felt that even though the stories took place at different times that it took away from the story or made it confusing. I also found myself very interested in both story lines which is not usually the case for me. When there are dual narratives I always find that I'm not really interested in one and I just read through it to get back the one that I liked, but not with this one.
There was some parts that really creeped me out, like creeped out that I had to stop reading it late at night. I love an author that can do that to me. The part with the two men coming into the completely empty village and finding Brigitta and then thinking that her dead body moved and looked at them. I still cannot get that image out of my head!
I do feel that the ending could have been a little bit stronger and maybe just a bit more detail on what happened next to the group. However, I did really enjoy this story and will look forward to reading more by this author.

Such an interesting and engaging book. This story has you on the end of your seat. The family secrets, the mystery, the pyschological aspects. The first couple of chapters are a little slow but it gathers steam from there. This novel from a new writer is very intense and right on the money. This film crew has no idea what they are getting into. What to them is a documentary trying to find answers to questions turns into a horror lesson in survival. The answers that are found are not what was expected. Looking forward to her second novel.

In a nutshell -- this was some crazy stuff here!

I'm a sucker for mysterious disappearances and unexplained abandonment so this book offered up a premise that drew me in. A documentary filmmaker embarks on a project that she's been obsessed with for most of her life. Alice Lindstedt's maternal grandmother's entire family vanished from an old mining town over 60 years ago. The little village of Silvertjarn in Norrland had stood empty and untouched since 1959 when "all 900 residents disappeared under mysterious circumstances." Alice and 4 colleagues trek there with enough supplies to last them 6 days while they explore the area, take film, and photographs, and figure out what secrets may be revealed for their documentary. They have no idea what is about to happen to them in that place as they are the only ones to explore the area after two policeman found the only two people who were left behind on that August day in 1959-- a woman who was stoned to death and a newborn baby girl. NO SPOILERS.

Told in a Then and Now style, the narrative is engaging and immediately absorbing as the point of view shifts between Alice and her great-grandmother, Elsa. The details about what was happening in the village are revealed as Alice and her friends examine the remnants of a once thriving town left to the ravages of time and the encroachment of the surrounding forest. The atmosphere is tense and the mood is foreboding giving it all a Gothic feel without the supernatural. I read this in one sitting this afternoon and definitely enjoyed it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for this e-book ARC to read and review.

A little spooky and a whole lot eerie, THE LOST VILLAGE is the a new suspense novel by Camilla Sten and I found myself unable to put it down until the end. I was wholly invested in finding out whether or not they could solve the mystery of the lost villagers.
There were some unexpected twists and turns that caught me by surprise. Alice grew up listening to her grandmother talk about the village she grew up in and the mystery of what happened to the villagers. Her dream was to produce a documentary and solve the mystery. She assembles a crew and heads there to do pre-production and, hopefully, discover something those that came before her missed. The crew is an interesting mix of people, and, on top of the location’s eeriness, there are unresolved issues and secrets to deal with. They have barely gotten settled when strange things start happening and they wonder if they are truly alone.
The premise of the book is what caught my eye, and I enjoyed the pacing and the dual timeline. The story kept me engaged, but I did feel the characters in the present needed a bit more fleshing out. I can’t say that I really liked any of them, including Alice. Sten did a great job with the early timeline and conveying the dark atmosphere in the present. There were surprising twists and, overall, this was a solid spooky read even for someone who didn’t have experience with the works it was compared with.
Thank you to the publisher for an advanced reader’s copy of this novel. All opinions are my own and freely given.
#TheLostVillage #CamillaSten #MinotaurBooks

I was so excited for this one! I love the synopsis and couldn't wait to dive in. Unfortunelay I didn't love it. There was nothing wrong with the book, it just didnt hold my interest.

The writing of dual storylines was well done. It was clear who the characters were and where the story was leading. I also liked the backstory between the two female characters (in the present timeline) .

I would still read other books by this author in the future, I did enjoy her writing style.

The premise of this book was so promising. It sounded so creepy! I definitely wanted to keep reading to find out what happened to the missing townspeople, but there were things that bothered me as well.

Things I liked:
The description of the town. It sure was creepy, and I could picture how deserted and empty everything was.
The story and plot. Again, I wanted to find out what happened, so that kept my attention.
Dual timelines. An element I always love.

Things I didn't like:
I expected it to be scarier.
The awful depiction of mental illness, especially in the 50s timeline. Yes, it's part of the times and the era, as mental health and illness was completely misunderstood, even more than today. Even still, the treatment of Birgitta was atrocious, and the psychotic break of Tone was unrealistic.
The ending. Aina, an elderly woman in her late 70s, was somehow able to strangle a healthy young woman, bludgeon a healthy young man to death with a honey jar, walk around silently, and survive for 60 YEARS by just scrounging up what was left in the abandoned houses? Holy suspension of reality for the reader. And no one EVER thought to check the mines for the missing people?! Not once?

abandoned villages and cults and religious fanatics…oh my!

it’s warm and beautiful in pittsburgh, so it’s the perfect day to review a spooky, dark horror book! thank you to netgalley and st. martin's press for the gifted advanced readers copy of “the lost village” by camilla sten in exchange for an honest review.

documentary filmmaker alice lindstedt takes her friends/film crew to silvertjarn, the abandoned village where her grandmother’s entire family disappeared with the rest of the inhabitants in 1959. but a harmless filmmaking excursion quickly turns into a gory roller coaster ride as the group realizes they aren’t alone in the village…

the days leading up to the villagers’ disappearance intertwines with the present to create a thrilling, page-turning adventure with frightening violence and twists. the timelines were executed in a way that effortlessly overlapped. as you learn something in the present, you also learn something in the past that connects and makes sense of things. alternating timelines often become tricky and overdone, but i really enjoyed how camilla did it.

i did find myself a bit confused at times throughout the book, especially with some of the characters’ backstories, and i wasn’t entirely shocked by some of the twists, but it was such an atmospheric, eerie story that it didn’t really matter. it’s terrifying and graphic, and the “blair witch project meets midsommar” comparison is actually pretty spot-on. i thoroughly enjoyed unearthing the dark family secrets of silvertjarn.

When I read that this book is a thriller/mystery/horror that is a cross between Midsommar and Blair Witch Project I was like "Uh.... hell yeah!" I loooooooove stuff that has a persistent eerie/creepy vibe and you don't really know what's happening until everything culminates into a crazy ending -- but this didn't really do it for me.

The story follows Alice as she takes a film crew into an abandoned village where all 900+ residents disappeared at once 60 years before, leaving behind only a dead body and a newborn baby. Her goal is to scout the location for her upcoming documentary and look for clues as to what happened to the people of the village — including her grandma's family. As the crew explores the town, ~weird/spooksy~ stuff starts happening, which leads to a shocking ending that reveals the village's darkest secrets.

While our modern timeline plays out, we also get the occasional entry from Alice's great-grandmother Elsa as she lives through the harrowing rise of a dangerously charismatic pastor and the disturbing events that lead up to the town's inevitable disappearance.

For a thriller with short, easy-to-read chapters, this book took me forever to read. The premise seems so interesting, but nothing really gets going until about halfway through the book. The first half spends too long on explaining the strained relationships between the characters, which never really has enough of a payoff as the story moves along. Spooky-ish things DO happen (random walkie-talkie sounds, seeing figures, etc.) but I never really felt a sense of foreboding throughout and there wasn't enough to have me thinking "Is it real? Is it not? Is it supernatural?" etc.

On top of the slow pacing, I never really felt a connection to any of the characters. Alice is selfish and emotionally closed off, which makes it hard for me to sympathize with her as the story moves along. And when weird stuff happens, she never tells anyone! WHY?? Also, we don't get enough of the side characters to really feel one way or another about them. I ended up caring the most about Elsa and Robert (a minor character in the present).

I think this book's best aspect is Elsa's portions, which show us how an idyllic town can devolve into fear, paranoia, and fanaticism. This storyline was so compelling, I found myself longing to hear more from her. Elsa fights to save her daughter Aina from the new pastor's dangerous ideas — an interesting dynamic with an outcome I deeply cared about. I think the story could have been further improved if Sten included more of Aina's perspective and descent into the madness of what happened.

Overall, this book was fine. The details of the story are interesting, I just wish there was more spookiness and more of the past storyline. I think that you will enjoy this if you're a fan of thrillers or folk horror like The Blair Witch Project and The Ritual.

This book checked ALL the boxes for me.
Abandoned town. ✓
Exploring old spooky buildings. ✓
Photography and videography. ✓
Ghosts? ✓
Camping and the wilderness. ✓
I was hooked right from the start. I have a weakness for abandoned buildings and towns.
While I figured out what happened to the townspeople early on, it did not diminish my enjoyment of the book. I needed to make sure I was right. I needed to know why? And exactly how they came to their end.
This book delivered on an overwhelming sense of danger for both the past and the present characters. I kept wanting to yell at the them "Just get out now!".
While the MC was a bit of a pill who made some really bad decisions (as did most of the characters), I enjoyed this book immensely. There is a bit of suspended disbelief to be had, and I'm not sure the math for the characters ages match up, but overall I LOVED this book. This story is full of tension and unease...but in a good way (I now I'm weird). I gobbled this book up in 2 days, and that's only because I had to eat, sleep, and work. It is non-stop fun. I will read more by Sten. Now excuse me, I want to go explore an abandoned town now.

I received an advance copy of this book from #Netgalley for a fair and honest review.

Y'all I so wanted to love this one but it just didn't work for me. I think the modern gothic books just aren't my jam - but if they are yours then this one is for you !

What a creepy, addicting, page turning story! Thank you so much to the author, St Martins Press and NetGalley for this review copy!

A haunted history that’s left the world with more questions than answers. For Alice and “Tone”, it’s more real because they have a special tie to this abandoned town. Alice has brought help to start on a documentary to try and figure out the mystery of this small town. It seems the whole town just left or abandoned the town in 1959 and it stands exactly as it did then. What really happened though? That’s what Alice is determined to find out.

I really enjoyed this read, it’s been slow only because I dealt with a lot of migraines right after starting. Finished last night and was just floored at the twists that happened. It was so good and I highly recommend you all grab it!!

In the 1950s, the people that occupied a mining village in rural Sweden vanished, leaving only empty homes, a corpse in the town square, and lots of unanswered questions. The stuff of local legend, documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl - and her connection is personal. Her grandmother's entire family went missing. In a quest to find answers, Alice assembles a team to travel to the ghost town, and using her great aunt's letters to her grandmother as a guide, they set out to film their findings over the period of a week. Effectively cut-off from civilization, Alice's team quickly realize that they are in over their heads as equipment is destroyed, team members are injured, and readers begin to realize that Alice might not be the most reliable narrator.

'The Lost Village' by Camilla Sten sounded exactly like the kind of book that I would want to read. Hailed as a mix of Midsommar meets The Blair Witch Project, it is these things...and it isn't. 'The Lost Village' is a good book. The pacing is great, we begin with an intertextual framework that reveals the mystery and the major players right at the beginning. The characters begin to develop over the following chapters as we move back and forth between present day timelines with Alice's crew and back to the summer of 1959 with Alice's great aunt and great grandmother as narrators. The perspective of the great aunt is revealed to us in the letters she sent to Alice's grandmother that are inserted as chapter breaks. This was initially confusing until I was able to firmly grasp the characters in my mind, but that might not be everyone's experience.

The doom-tracker slowly increases as we begin to realize just how isolated the village is. Add to this lurking shadows in the background, sinister giggling, and a faulty narrator(s) and you have a shifty story that lets all the creepy feelings in.

'The Lost Village' really had my attention right up until the end. The author gives us a good story, but where I expect to feel catharsis after a horror movie (per the publicity surrounding the descriptive copy) I was instead left feeling incredibly sad as the mystery of the 'lost village' is revealed in full. This is an incredibly dark book. Dark in ways that I did not see coming or expected. The writing is dynamic, cinematic, and the story is a proper scary story, but the ending didn't work for me. 'The Lost Village' is not a bad book, not by a long shot. But it was just ok.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for sharing a digital ARC with me in exchange for an honest review.

I really don't remember the last time a book scared me - like that truly chilling, creepy, hair-raised feeling you get while watching a scary movie. I love reading horror and thriller books, but I generally don't find them to be as scary as watching an actual horror movie. This one changed my mind on that.

The book takes place in two time periods, "then" is set in the late 1950s, when the town of Silvertjärn was winding down from its heyday after the local mine closed, and "now" is set in the present day, when a ragtag group of amateur documentarians comes back to the long-deserted village to film for a true crime, investigative project.

What's so special about this little town? Back in 1959, a pair of cops came to the town and found something deeply unsettling: first, not a single soul in sight. In the middle of the summer, there were no children playing, no people working, no shops open - as if everyone had just vanished into thin air. Second, in the middle of the town square, the cops found a body hanging from a tall pole, mutilated, stoned to death. Third, in one of the abandoned buildings, they found a baby with no name, no history, and no family to speak of.

Decades later, a woman named Alice, a descendant of a Silvertjärn native who moved to Stockholm just before the residents vanished, leads the documentary crew back to the village. Things quickly start going wrong, from injuries to freak accidents to downright horrifying visions. Something isn't right in Silvertjärn.

The description in the summary - Midsommar meets Blair Witch Project - is exactly spot on. As I was reading, I felt strong elements of both works, an uber-culty mob in a small Scandinavian town, a documentary crew coming back decades later to a village of creepy, abandoned houses in the middle of a forest and a wireless dead zone... It's the perfect setting. All of the elements of a perfect and inventive scary story are here, and the execution is 95% perfect too.

If you like creepy stories, cults, true crime, or all of the above, this is the perfect book for you. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC via Netgalley!

Couldn't put this down!! I highly recommend waiting until you have time to devour the entire book before starting.

Fast paced and had some spooky vibes but isn't what I consider a thriller. I enjoyed it nonetheless. Possible a few things could have been lost in translation from the Swedish version.

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten Is a atmospheric horror that is slightly unnerving. The Lost Village is a Swedish book that has been translated to English. The descriptions make it feel like characters are constantly being watched by the village, it makes the reader feel pretty unnerved. The mystery is pretty captivating, and the way the story is told by amateur documentarians, really works since they bring their own problems, to a place that feeds off those problems. The Lost Village reminded me of parts of Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery meets the film The Blair Witch Project. I was slightly underwhelmed my the climax, but the rising action to it was so cool I thought of all these other cool scenarios that would have made it epic, and the climax was just good. Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press through Minotaur books for letting me have early access to this title. The Lost Village by Camilla Sten was published in Sweden in 2019 and translated/published in America on March 23 2021.

The Plot: Alice is crowd funding for a documentary, on a village called Silvertjarn which was named for it silver mine. The other thing Slivertjarn is known for is in 1959 all 800 village members went missing and never found again with the exception of one baby found in a school house and a body strung up and stoned to death. Alice has ties to the village through her grandma's sister, she has rare correspondence in the form of letters days before the missing village. She brings on a team of people that believe in the project but with secrets of their own some about the village but some about Alice herself.

What I Liked: The atmosphere that this horror story starts right in the beginning and goes all the way to the end. Are the documentary crew experiencing mass paranoia or are they being watched. The flow of this book made it hard to put down. It reminds me of The Blair Witch Project as little things added up slowly. The flashbacks really work and add intrigue to the story, it is told through letters and then we see what really went down through one characters eyes. The mystery of the crew members was good as well.

What I Disliked: I wanted to know a lot more about Pastor Mattias, we only learn a few things, it was too much of a mystery for the end. The climax could have been better.

Recommendation: I would recommend my readers to take this wild unnerving ride. It is a good addition to the horror genre with real people with real problems inserted into a horror village with no cell phone and civilization 45 miles away. I rated The Lost Village by Camilla Sten 4 out of 5 stars. This novel was very close to 5 stars but the climax brought it down. I will be picking up Camilla Sten's next novel I like the descriptions and atmosphere a lot.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a chance to review an e-arc of this book.

In The Lost Village, we follow Alice and her team, who have ventured to a village that has been abandoned for some time after all of the inhabitants have disappeared. The group is there to scout the location for an upcoming documentary about the mystery surrounding the village. But as they explore, they begin to feel like the village might not be abandoned after all.

I really liked the premise of this book, but the end result fell short of my expectations. Camilla Sten’s writing did a good job of creating a suspenseful atmosphere and I was drawn into the mystery at the start.

There were some unnerving parts that added to the creepy atmosphere created by the author, but the end reveal felt unrealistic to me. It would have been easier for me to accept ghosts or something else supernatural in nature than the actual explanation of the events.

I will try other books by Sten in the future because I did enjoy the writing.

Thank you to Netgalley, for my copy of The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, for an honest review. Camilla Sten, definitely took the reader for a topsy, creepy ride. An entire village in a mining town, in Sweden disappears. Alice Lindstedt, a documentary film maker is obsessed with the story of the town and the disappearance. How can an entire town disappear and why hasn’t anyone else tried to figure it out. Alice, needs her film to be a success. She is strapped for funding, has no one else to ask for money and has to work with a rag tag team to document. As they stay in the Village, weird things start to happen, stories about the town start to spook the film team and they are all pretty sure they are not the only ones in the Village. The author did a great job with this story. I was hooked and needed to find out how this would end. I was surprised at how it all came to head. For a first novel this was an excellent effort. I rated this four stars and look forward to reading more works by this author. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I have also recommended this on my Instagram page.