The Shapeshifters
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This tale of missing children and mythic monsters is “a fantastic novel in every sense of the word” (Karl Ove Knausgård).
Summer 1978. A young boy disappears without a trace from a summer cabin. His mother claims he was carried away by a giant. He is never found.
Twenty-five years later, another child goes missing. This time there’s a lead, a single photograph taken by Susso Myrén. She’s devoted her life to the search for trolls, legendary giants known as stallo who can control human thoughts and assume animal form. Convinced that the fabled beasts are real, she follows the trail of missing children to northern Sweden. But humans, some part stallo themselves, have been watching over the creatures for generations, and this hidden society of protectors won’t hesitate to close its deadly ranks.
Mixing folklore and history, suspense and the supernatural, The Shapeshifters is an extraordinary journey into a frozen land where myth bleeds into reality.
“Spjut has accomplished the masterstroke of writing convincingly about the existence of trolls and other mythical creatures in the Nordic forests . . . all this unfolds in a language that captures the everyday reality we know so well, with such precision and exquisite style that the words seem to sparkle on the page.” —Karl Ove Knausgård, author of My Struggle
“A fun, cunning crime thriller . . . If you enjoy the novels of Michael Koryta or Tana French’s The Secret Place . . . you might eat up The Shapeshifters.” —Chicago Tribune
“Spjut turns Scandinavian mythology upside down in a shades-of-gray world built for lovers of fantastical suspense.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four-year-old Matthias Mickelsson has been kidnapped from his home in Sweden. The only lead is a picture of a small, odd-looking man snapped by a motion-sensitive camera belonging to Susso Myr n. She has devoted her life to proving that trolls exist, after seeing one in a picture her father took years before. But after the suspect's picture gets national attention, Susso is attacked by those who hide and protect the stallo shape-shifting trolls and other creatures from legend. Susso must race across Sweden looking for clues about the stallo, the kidnapping, and a similar crime from 25 years before, while stallo and their guardians hunt her. Shape-shifting isn't the only dangerous stallo power threatening Susso, and the creatures have spent centuries learning how to protect themselves. The story is understated even at its most tense. Spjut's prose evokes a cold, mythical Scandinavian landscape, with creatures as ephemeral as a remote forest's mist yet as solid as mountains. Spjut turns Scandinavian mythology upside down in a shades-of-gray world built for lovers of fantastical suspense.