Book 11 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Largely caught up at this point. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I am a sucker for stories about old creepy abandoned places. An abandoned mine, an abandoned house, an abandoned ship, an abandoned village: all literary catnip for me. So when I came across Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village (2022), I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.

Sten is a Swedish author and The Lost Village apparently first appeared in Swedish in 2019 and was translated into English in 2022. The book was a critical and international success, launching the career of the now prolific Sten.

The story:

One day in 1959, the residents of the declining village of Silvertjärn disappeared. There were only two people found — a newborn, abandoned in the local school, and a young woman, tied to a pole in the town square and stoned to death. The authorities were able to find no information about the fate of the residents, and the town has remained abandoned ever since.

But the filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the village her entire life. Her grandmother, who left Silvertjärn before the vanishing, left her a trove of family letters to pour over, and Alice has made it her life’s goal to make a documentary about the incident and, just maybe, solve the mystery. She has launched a fundraiser for the film and has assembled a group of friends to travel to the remote location to perform some preliminary investigations and generate buzz for the project.

They are on a tight schedule and can only afford to stay for five days, so they launch right into exploring the village. But almost immediately, unsettling things begin to happen. They hear a strange voice on their walkie talkies and several of them seem to spot a figure watching them at night. Soon, equipment is destroyed and it becomes clear that something is with them in the village — something that means them harm and will not let them leave.

The Lost Village is a delightfully atmospheric, creepy story! The sense of isolation is well done, as is the description of the dangers of exploring buildings that have been unoccupied for decades. The village of Silvertjärn is well fleshed out and, as in most stories about spooky places, is essentially a character in and of itself.

The novel oscillates between the present day (with chapters simply labeled “NOW”) and the time leading up to the disappearances in Silvertjärn (labeled “THEN”). As the story progresses, we gradually learn what exactly happened back in 1959, until the past and present collide in a horrific finale.

This is also a story about mental illness in women and how society views them, as is noted in the foreword by Sten herself. The three women on the project — Alice, Tone, and Emmy — each have their own pasts and struggles, and the book is as much an exploration of how the others react to those struggles as it is about the horror of the situation.

Overall, The Lost Village is a masterfully crafted story of suspense and horror and well worth reading. I was captivated by it from beginning to end!