As a rule, if a novel about telepathic shapeshifting lemmings is blurbed by Karl Ove Knausgaard, I’ll read it. So far that category includes only Stefan Spjut’s “The Shapeshifters,” published in
Sweden in 2012 under the title “Stallo,” and newly, smoothly translated into English.
In the folklore of the Sami people (Laplanders) stallo are big, dumb, hostile trolls. Trolls loom large and ugly in Scandinavian folk tales, sort of like giant leprechauns with less money. In Spjut’s version, which owes a great deal to illustrator John Bauer, who plays a small but crucial part in the story, there are also small elf-like trolls, and the whole race can change into the shapes of various animals at will. You’ve got your “foxshifters,” your “mouseshifters,” “batshifters,” “rabbitshifters,” “lemmingshifters” and “bearshifters.”
It’s the stallo who transform into very bad news bears. There are only four of the giants left, each centuries old, and they get up to mischief for some reason when they don’t have a human child to watch at play. This penchant allows Spjut to put cryptozoology to work supporting a freaky entry in the dark-Scandinavian-crime-fiction sweepstakes.
The novel begins in 1978, in the Swedish woods. A mother and her young son retire to a summer cabin for a few days, but the local forest creatures are acting unnaturally. People of Sweden: If a hare and fox appear to be friends and just sit there staring at you, get the hell out. Because a troll probably is going to steal your kid. And the authorities will dismiss your talk about giants and weird animal behavior as the product of a grief-mad mind.
Then it’s 2004, and Susso Myrén, the daughter of a famous photographer who once snapped a shot of a small troll riding a bear, runs a website devoted to “ethnoknown cryptids — animals spotted by local people that somehow never revealed themselves to scientists for documentation.” She has spent her adult life chasing her father’s troll, interviewing people who claim to have seen monsters — fruitlessly — until Edit Mickelsson’s grandson goes missing. A little man with eyes like a cat’s has been hanging around Edit’s house.
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There ensues a gritty tall tale involving road trips, nasty backwoods troll guardians, mountain ambushes, surveillance, arson, psychic manipulation by lemming, daring escapes, lots of snus, and sentences like “It was immediately apparent that this squirrel was no ordinary squirrel.”
The whole giddy yarn is a refreshing departure from the norm — surely we’ve had enough novels from pleasant socialist countries in which a grisly corpse is discovered in a field, whereupon a sallow, surly, alcoholic detective has hunches in icy landscapes while psychological conflicts abound and there’s a tense climax in an underground dungeon or something. It takes skill to write a showdown between a giant troll and a squirrel that is taut and suspenseful instead of ridiculous. (It helps that the characters, recognizing the absurdity of their predicament, say things like, “I can’t believe a squirrel is protecting me from the giant troll trying to eat me.”)
Now, maybe trolls are a bridge too far for you (get it?). But I read every book my elementary school library had on Bigfoot about 40 times and fell in love as an adult with Tove Jansson’s Swedish-speaking Moomintrolls. (One downside of this is that it was hard not to picture Spjut’s giants as cute cartoon hippopotamuses.)
So I might be biased. But I found “The Shapeshifters” to be a fun, cunning crime thriller whose supernatural elements add to the thrills without seeming silly or gimmicky. I read the first 300 pages in one sitting and the last 300 in another. I can’t agree with Knausgaard that “the words seem to sparkle on the page”; maybe lines like “She was annoyed about something” or “You could say she had my back against the wall” are more sparkly in Swedish. But I’ll take Spjut’s clean, economical prose over the purple undergraduate existentialism that weighs down plenty of Nordic narratives.
If you enjoy the novels of Michael Koryta or Tana French’s “The Secret Place” — mysteries with a similarly laissez-faire attitude toward phenomena that don’t actually exist outside the imagination of Stephen King and like-minded writers — you might eat up “The Shapeshifters” as eagerly as I did.
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Second Sex.”
“The Shapeshifters”
By Stefan Spjut, translated by Susan Beard, Mariner, 587 pages, $15.95