Yule Island by Johana Gustawsson combines French Noir and Nordic Noir. Gustawsson, a French writer now residing in Sweden, embraces the dark Scandinavian nights to set her latest thriller on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago.
Despite the picturesque environment, it’s evident from the start that this is going to be a terrible story, with the body of a teenage girl discovered hanging from a tree. As the plot progresses, it appears that the island of Storholmen conceals more than meets the eye.
The island is home to one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, and as the centenary of their family mansion’s construction approaches, an art expert is engaged to catalogue the items within the property. The work comes with clear directions, but rooms can only be accessed at specific times and in a specific order. There are echoes of Susan Hill’s terrifying The Woman in Black in the reader’s perception of a menacing presence lurking behind closed doors.
As Emma, the art expert, looks deeper into the family collection, we learn that her motivation for being on the island isn’t solely for work. Emma, like most of the characters in Gustawsson’s winding story, harbours a dark secret. When a second body is discovered nine years after the first, it is obvious that a serial killer is on the loose.
Inspector Karl Rosén, the police inspector tasked with uncovering the relationship between these nearly a-decade-apart crimes, is a tortured character with his own demons to battle, as are many of his Nordic noir counterparts. He’s juggling the pressures of solving crimes that have piqued the public’s interest while simultaneously looking for his missing wife, whose disappearance may not be as simple as it appears.
The real-life island of Storholmen is known for its Viking Village Museum and Gustawsson infuses the Yule Island plot with Nordic culture, mythology, folklore, and Viking legend intertwined into the current contemporary story. There’s also clearly well-researched forensic detail in the work, which adds realism and immediacy.
Readers are taken on a journey through the island and through time as narrative strands are gently unravelled in the first person, with each chapter dedicated to a different speaker. What role does the big home play in these events, why is there a nine-year gap between killings, and what does the ritualistic staging of the bodies mean? As each chapter progresses, a new viewpoint appears, offering a little more detail.
Yule Island has a timeless, old-fashioned vibe to it. Despite being set mostly in modern Sweden, the rural pace, tiny cast of characters, and references to the class difference between the affluent and their servants in a great mansion have a Victorian flavour to them. Only the addition of technology like WhatsApp groups returns the reader to the present day.
With its shifting narrator and time periods, this is a work that requires focus; there are times when skipping back a few paragraphs to clarify who is speaking and where pays dividends. It’s a focus that pays off with a wealth of detail in Gustawsson’s prose (translated by David Warriner).
Yule Island may lack the frenzied tempo of other Nordic Noir mainstays, but it’s no less unsettling in its scope, and the depth of characterization in this first installment of a projected series leaves a lot of possibilities for the future.
Orenda Books will release Jule Island by Johan Gustawsson on November 23, 2023.
