To my surprise, however, there wasn’t a single story I disliked. I tend to grow too emotionally invested, even in short stories, and “Rebecka” was easily the most difficult for me to read. When I found myself in the midst of unsettling stories, I thought there would be something that would turn me off. That’s just the sort of mood this collection left me in. It’s merely less so.) These are stories that ought to have time to settle, lest they take root somewhere in your mind and open doors that should have been left closed.ĭid I make that last sentence as eerie as possible because the book is the eeriest I’ve read lately? Maybe. “Rebecka”, for instance, is the story of a woman seemingly literally abandoned by God, is a far more disturbing read than “Beatrice”, the tale of a man who falls in love with an airship.

In theory, it’s true – counting the afterward, the book is just over a hundred and fifty pages long – but in practice the stories are so unsettling that even the shortest one lingers. The stories in this book are deceptively short, and it would be easy to believe that you could read them in a series of short sittings. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the two genres are more connected than I first thought. One of my very first reviews for this site was a collection of speculative fiction set during the Age of Discovery, dealing with subjects as varied as the invention of a new sort of clock to Darwin’s secret voyage another, more recent favorite, was a set of three reviews about a trilogy translated from Swedish about a group of schoolgirls who hold the power to save the world.

With Jagannath, I return to two genres I have visited in earlier reviews: short stories and Scandinavian fiction.

Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck