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Harbor / John Ajvide Lindqvist

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After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared.

Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nostalgic look at island life in the twentieth century and give the reader a sense of Sweden of yesteryear. In spite of the sepia-tinted nostalgia, an overall sense of foreboding grows increasingly in this 500-page novel until a cataclysmic event obliterates everything.

John Ajvide Lindqvist is perhaps best known for Let the Right One In, made into a Swedish-language film and also as an English version film in 2010 with the title Let Me In. John Ajvide Lindqvist is frequently compared to Stephen King, and Harbor is his latest book to be translated into English. (The title in Swedish is Människohamn, which is Human Harbor, though I think a better title might have been The Depths).

The translation by Marlaine Delargy is fantastic and is part of why the novel is so compelling. It’s not a perfect novel, but very unique and one which I had trouble putting down.

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