Author Camilla is a Force. Her storytelling chops, in this her debut novel!, are truly impressive. Usually split timelines, here denoted by labeling chapters "Now" and "Then", give me pause. It so seldom adds impetus to the natural pace of the story. In Author Sten's case she overcame this. By itself that merits praise...but to use it, as here, in setting a perceptual "trap" for her readers, is extraordinarily tough to pull off.

The framing device that threatened, at first, to derail my enjoyment of the story was also the biggest surprise to me: A long stretch of "Now" spent reading letters discovered in the Lost Village. While that by itself isn't bad, so very often it is a deus ex machina and so feels like a cheat to me. I re-read parts of the section to see if I could find the seams but I couldn't...I kept running across images I lingered over (eg doubts creeping up on a character like "stinging little devils") and action I wanted to follow right now. That's good horror writing...good writing, period.

Much of the seemingly inevitable comparison-to-known-things marketing has borne down hard on <I>Midsommar</i>, a stunningly beautiful folk-horror film whose story is stretched to the point of snapping in order to make its beautiful scenes...seriously, go look at it, the stills should be sold as art!...work. Also harked back to is <I>The Blair Witch Project</i>, whose shakycam found-footage horror story was, to put it mildly, a farrago but whose fascinating editing (predictable and pedestrian aren't necessarily ineffective in horror storytelling) has deeply influenced the entire field of visual horror storytelling. This comparison is, to me, fair and reasonable; the Midsommar one is a stretch and honestly a disservice to the story here told.

This is folk horror as only a Swede setting her story in Sweden would, possibly could, produce. But it's much, much more unnerving to me, more frightening, than Midsommar because this story is about the intersection of mental illness and religious fanaticism that is its own form of mental illness...but grounded in a solid, meaningful, and thoughtful take-down of capitalism and patriarchy.
<blockquote>We perceive women suffering from mental illness with a sort of paradoxical double-sidedness; both victims and monsters, simultaneously infantilized and feared. A certain level of dysfunction is accepted—after all, women who are suffering mild depression and starving themselves aren’t going to leave their husbands or start revolutions, which is very practical indeed.
–and–
We view a depressed upper-class woman from a stable family background dealing with depression as “having the blues,” while the homeless woman on the street corner battling auditory hallucinations is a thing to be feared, a threatening monster. Not a person in need of help. Not someone with thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs of their own. Not a fully formed human being with agency and identity, suffering from an illness and doing their best to function as well as they can.</blockquote>
Author Sten is singin' my song; Translator Fleming is wrapping it in stylish English.

Several friends of mine who read and reviewed the book, all of them women, weren't impressed with the author's feminist take as presented, and to a woman they were dismissive of the "folk horror" trappings the US publisher wrapped around the story. In that latter I hesitantly join them, but as a man I felt the feminist, or more accurately anti-patriarchal, views the author quite clearly espouses by way of contrast to the "Then" action and more clearly espouses in the "Now" if via a dark means, rang me like a bell.

Permaybehaps I'm settling, in the sense that it might not be as clear to the women because it's not enough of a feminist standpoint. I can't say; I can say that, to me, this read bound together creepy, scary real-life threats and challenges with a social and political slant I am in sympathy with. You should give Author Camilla Sten a shot, see what you think.

Wow..."relentlessly creepy" is a perfect way to describe this book. Secrets, secrets and more secrets made for a fascinating read that will stay with me for awhile!!!

The Lost Village Camilla Sten
This book isn't for me, not grabbing my attention unfortunately, I might come back to it later.

I did not have a good time with this one.
This was a slow burn. Very slow. Almost glacial.
The characters are hard to root for as none of them are particularly pleasant or dynamic.
The setting was good. There was lots of creepy atmosphere. The remote and abandoned nature of this town worked really well. I also enjoyed the lore of it. The backstory of how this town was slowly taken over and why everyone went missing was a very interesting story. So interesting that I kept being disappointed when I was sent back to the present to the film crew.
The "horror" in the present seemed to mostly revolve around walking up different staircases that were rickety. I'm not kidding. This happened like 12 times. What's scarier than failing infrastructure, am I right?

I loved this book! I loved the cult aspect and the switching timelines was really interesting. I loved how everything tied together in the end!

This was a great book! I found it to be creepy and eerie. I'm a really big fan of Midsommar and this book totally gave the same vibes.

I wasn't a big fan of the ending but the overall story was good and the ominous town kept me running through my house avoiding the dark for a few days, lol!

'The Lost Village: A Novel' by Camilla Sten is a mystery/ thriller but not horror. The premise is great the execution is fine..

This book gave me Shelly Jackson vibes with it's atmospheric and foreboding details.
The duel timeline narration kept me interested and suspensefully drove the stories forward. The ending wasn't my favorite but this was a classic "scary story"

This book feels like starting a quick hike into the woods, but slowly feeling more dread and confusion as you get deeper into your walk. Just like the characters in this story, you are starting to realize that maybe this little excursion has shadows and secrets that you didn't anticipate.

A small documentary film crew treks into the abandoned Swedish mining town of Silvertjarn to cover the unsolved mystery of how the mining town was discovered abruptly deserted save a bludgeoned corpse tied up on the main square and a baby left alone in one of the buildings. Two visiting men find this disturbing and confounding situation and no investigation has yielded any plausible results since. In present day, each member of the film crew has reasons for being there which is slowly unraveled throughout the story in interactions with each other and events that happen in the plot. Some have ties to the town, some have ties to each other. Either way, these ties cause all of the characters and the reader to have abounding suspicions. With an incredibly atmospheric and unnerving setting, this story is in effect a sort of locked room mystery rooted in horror.

The story flashes in between the current documentary film crew's experiences in the town and the perspective of a mother and daughter who lived in Silvertjarn during the time period the residents disappeared. While you can rather easily surmise in the flashback perspective who the catalyst for the mystery of the story is going to be, the how and the why and the what about the present day happenings will keep you reeled in to the plot. This book really has one of those wonderful atmospheres that creeps off the page and makes the story. The characters were fleshed out enough to inform the story but not enough to ruin the mystique of the events.

I give this book four of out of five stars. The setting is ominous, the characters are a solid support to the horror and mystery of the unfolding events, the atmosphere was dreadfully perfect. More suspense and dread than action horror. If you want a great atmospheric horror read that pulls you into the fog without having to keep notes on the mindboggling plot or character details, this is a read for you.

Had a hard time getting into the book at first, definitely a slow start for me. Once I was into it ...it was creepy and dark!

Finished reading The Lost Village late last night and was grateful for my little comfort cat because my heart was racing. This was a masterfully atmospheric read—the setting was essentially a (verrrrrry creepy) character in itself. The title is in reference to a remote Swedish ghost town, whose residents vanished without a trace, leaving behind all their possessions, never to be heard from again. The protagonist, Alice, is an aspiring filmmaker with familial ties to the village—her grandmother grew up there but married and moved away prior to the vanishing. Alice and her small team set up camp among the crumbling buildings and overgrown paths, only to suspect that they might not be alone after all—and their objective begins to shift from capturing the perfect shots to getting out alive.

Weaving back and forth from the weeks before the disappearance to the present day, this story kept me guessing—and thoroughly creeped out. Can’t wait to see more from Camilla Sten!

The Lost Village is a creepy and atmospheric suspense novel set in an abandoned and isolated village in Silvertjärn, Sweden. This book is compared a lot to The Blair Witch Project and for good reason. Both are about documentary crews who are in the middle of nowhere and are trying to uncover the truth of a local mystery. This is a dual timeline story where we are following a woman back in the 1950’s and we get to see from her perspective the events that led to the abandonment of the town. The bulk of the story though, is told from our current day protagonist, Alice, who has put together a documentary crew to do the ground work for potential investors to eventually make a full documentary about what happened in Silvertjärn. Beyond being a bizarre story in Swedish history, Alice is also enthralled by Silvertjärn because her Grandmother used to live there and had just moved away when things started to turn sinister. Her Grandmother’s family were among the missing residents that have never been found and Alive grew up hearing stories of them. Compounded with the intrigue of trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the residents of Silvertjärn, there is also a lot of drama and history between the five members of the documentary crew.

The mystery of what happened to all the people living in Silvertjärn is what propels this story forward but at its core this is a character driven story about the choices people make and the things they believe in. My favorite thing about this book is that I was never sure where Sten was going with this story. Everything feels so eerie and unsettling, both with the setting and with the characters in both timelines. Sten did a masterful job of taking all these tendrils of story and weaving into one surprising and unnerving ending.

As a lover of everything thriller, horror and suspense this book totally hit the mark for me. I vividly felt that I was there with the characters and I adored all the creepy and insidious elements. Because of that I really took my time reading this to fully immerse myself in everything that Sten had to offer. If you are looking for a book that has both a creepy atmosphere and a compelling mystery along with unnerving elements than this is the book to pick up.

This book was very interesting and fast-paced, the author held my attention and the plot was very appealing. I would recommend this book to friends.

Dark, suspenseful, exciting, devourable read set in an isolated, lost Scandinavian village.
The story follows two timeliness - one through letters, one via the experiences of a group of aspiring filmmakers trying to uncover the mystery of an entire village full of people going missing.
The setting is vivid and creepy, the atmosphere positively ghastly, the glimpses of the past completely fascinating. I had a great time reading this story and can't wait for Camilla Sten's next one!

This book is a definite page-turner that moves along at an appropriate pace and the author did a fantastic job at world-building. I would have liked a little more character development and I was a little disappointed with how the plot played out at the end. Overall, a super creepy read with definite ‘Blair Witch meets Midsommar’ vibes!

In this atmospheric Swedish thriller that's reminiscent of Blair Witch, Midsommar, and Midnight Mass; a group of friends travels to an abandoned village to document its history.

This definitely had a slow burn, but overall, I think <u>The Lost Village</u> was perfectly creepy. The only thing that really got me was some of the inconsistencies throughout the novel, particularly in regards to character descriptions. They weren't super detrimental to the story but they just irked me (the pastor's eyes being compared to another character's even though his are "a cold gray" and hers are "an emerald green", or someone's hair being described as "light and fair" and then suddenly it's "dark and thick"). I don't think this was the most well-written or original thriller I've read as of late, but it was definitely entertaining and worth the read!

This one is a creepy good time! This one had me checking the locks on my door. Don't read it at night!

Thank you Netgalley for my gifted ARC!
As soon as I read the synopsis of this, I knew I was going to love it!! I had no idea where it was going half of the time and the way the chapters switched between present time and 60 years ago was gripping!!!! This village story was super creepy and gave me the chills! Definitely don't read in the dark lol. Overall this perfect horror book was just what I needed to get me out of my reading slump. Even though I wanted more answers from the ending and was left a little unsettles, I enjoyed the spooky story!

The premise of The Lost Village is amazing and I was really looking forward to reading it. It just didn't live up to the (my) hype, unfortunately.

In 1959, an entire Swedish town just disappears. Sixty years later and a film crew is making a documentary about it. No actual filmmaking occurred though – which was an aspect I was excited about.

I never felt connected to any of the characters. In fact, I don't feel like any of them were ever fleshed out completely.

This wasn't a bad book, just not something I would read again or go out of my way to recommend.

I enjoyed the overall story and creepy vibe of the abandoned town setting. Slightly predictable but still fun and engaging.