The Lost Village

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Manufacturer: Camilla Sten
Brand: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Horror Fiction
Brew: Audiobook
Steeping Time: 9 hours 47 minutes
Tea Service: Personal Choice
Strength:

Synopsis: 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. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left – a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn – have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

But there will be no turning back.

Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:

They are not alone.

They’re looking for the truth… But what if it finds them first?

I love a good mystery.

Make it an entire-population-goes-missing mystery with a ghost town, and now you’re talking. I’ve been in the mood for something spooky for months, and I’ve been waiting just as long to get a copy of The Lost Village from the library (if you don’t use OverDrive, you should! It’s amazing. *Sidenote: OverDrive is in the process of being discontinued and Libby is taking its place.). The Lost Village combines a whole array of things that I love and squishes them all into one story; history, mystery, ruins, abandoned towns, and something that goes bump in the night.

The story follows a group of filmmakers that head out to the abandoned town of Silvertjärn in the wilds of Sweden to try and uncover the mystery that has shrouded the village since 1959. Well, that’s the end goal, at least. For now, they’re trying to get enough footage during their five days there so that they can drum up more interest in the project. From the start, there is tension within the group. Alice obviously has a backstory with Emmy, another woman on their crew, and it isn’t good. It sets the tone before the group even makes it fully into Silvertjärn, so right from the start, we’re on uneven ground. Unsurprisingly, it only goes downhill from there.

As we go with the filmmakers through their journey, we also get flashbacks to 1959.

Some of these flashbacks occur in the form of letters, while others are from the viewpoint of Elsa, Alice’s great-grandmother. The fate that befell the town is slowly unveiled, one tiny piece at a time. As the story progresses, the tension, both past and present, slowly rises. You don’t even notice it at first. It’s like standing in slowly rising water. By the time you do notice, full-blown panic is only a breath away.

Overall, I enjoyed The Lost Village. I loved that we got to see the village while it was still alive and thriving, and that we got to poke through the ruins of it decades later. It awakened that beautiful spot of nostalgia in me, even if it was for a place that doesn’t truly exist. It COULD exist, and that’s enough for me.

I really love the mirroring that happens between the dual timelines as well. As things progressively get worse in the past, they do so in the present as well. We learn more about what happened then, and it slowly knits together the picture of what is going wrong for Alice and her crew. I think Camilla Sten did a phenomenal job in weaving the two storylines together. They compliment each other so well and really help to build a deeper level to the story.

The book is definitely suspenseful and it kept me guessing.

I wasn’t sure if there was actually someone else in the village with them or if they were slowly losing their minds. However, I found some of it rather predictable. I won’t say which part, because it will spoil the whole book, but Camilla Sten did fall upon some tropes that are a bit overused, in my opinion. It still worked, don’t get me wrong, but I’d have loved to see something else instead of the same-old.

Even with that, I was enthralled with this book. Things start to go wrong in the beginning, and it only escalates. The suspense kept me glued to the audiobook late into the night, and the creepiness of it all definitely hit the spot. The only thing that would top this book would be going to an actual village like Silvertjärn and poking around. Although I don’t think I’d be up for spending the night. Not anymore.

Have you read The Lost Village? Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about it! Want to read it for yourself? Click here to get a copy of your own.
Cheers,
Lydia