I read this book as part of my December reading list and it was massive! Despite its sheer size, the book didn’t have much of a plot or anything going for it. And it was a bit disjointed at times when chapters ended with some italic font talking about something completely unrelated like an old man walking his dog and looking in the harbour.

That being said, there are characters and a town that is facing a civil war, all caused by a container that washed up on the beach. If you’ve seen the movie “Nowhere“, you can probably tell what the refugees’ journey has been like, the hardships they had to go through just to reach that container and the book does spend some time detailing the gruelling deaths inside.

When the container washes up in the Norrtälje harbour, nobody wants to be the one to open it. There’s debate as to what’s inside and loads of speculation. The delay in opening it up causes the last few souls that were inside to die when they could have been saved and the town of Norrtälje is taken over by two things: a grief and hate cloud that muddies the river and an ever increasing sense of things going to shit.

We have a cast of 6 characters, each with their own lives and dreams and somehow they all find themselves back in Norrtälje as the container is opened and we can watch them slowly being affected by it.

The book is a bit like Stephen King * Needful Things where people in a small town are getting weirder due to an outside force and there will be a violent outbreak to top it all off. And the book is also about friendship, love, working out to lose weight, dealing with the local Norrtälje mafioso, caring for the elderly, sybils, oracles, issues when dating a single mother and a lot of Pokemon Go.

If you’ve never played the game, you’ll find some of the talk about Charizzard and Charmander a bit confusing and you’ll think why do people meet to attack a Gym?

I think the author just wanted to write a book about life in a small town and then decided it would be too boring so he added a couple of social issues like the influx of immigrants, the increase in violent crimes and the discrimination some people face. Marko, for example, is also an immigrant from Bosnia so he knows first hand how to integrate and work his way up to success. He can afford a 13 mil kronoer house for his parents to move into (a bit lavish) and he also has posh friends in Stokholm who have brand new black Audis and can afford coke as a fun way to spend time.

On the other side you have a writer who is stuck in the writer’s ideal book trap and accidentally fans the fires of racial hate against the immigrants in the town after being nearly robbed. He’s also a closeted gay guy in love with Marko who works in a bowling alley.

Max, Johan and Marko meet two lovely girls (Anna and Siw) and they make friends. Anna is an Oluffson – a bit rough around the edges but with her heart in the right place. Her family is known in the area for robberies, acts of violence and Anna’s brother has just gotten out of jail for beight caught delivering coke. Anna’s brother is also Siw’s daughter’s father (after a one time rape).

Siw is a single mom and she is in love with Max from afar and has been casually stalking his Facebook profile from afar and loves to play Pokemon Go with him.

Maria also enters the picture (Marko’s supermodel sister) who is coming back home as her modeling / acting contract is coming to an end and she has blown most of her money on drugs and alchool.

Back to the story. Max, Siw, Anna, Johan, Marko and Maria go to parties together, and at the same time, Max and Siw are working to prevent some evil stuff happening that will kill a lot of people.

Max has a seeing ability, Siw can hear the future and her daughter can tell the date and time a thing will happen. After they try to stop a gas tanker from killing people (partially successfully), Max is arrested and Siw and her daughter go and testify in his favour, showcasing her daughter’s ability to foretell the future. Max is let go but the public opinion is already against him (I don’t see him lasting long in this town)

The end of the book is a doozy. The town is armed to the teeth ready to blow, but Siw and her daughter, mother and Grandma cleanse the dirty river of the evil spirit and everyone is mellow again and learns how to be more tolerant of other people and more kind and accepting.

I nearly threw the book against the wall. 700 pages and I felt cheated of a resolution. What did I just read? The stories and lives of 6 thirty year-olds and a romance…all in the small town of Norrtälje.

The bad parts:

The story is very linear without any direct twists or surprises. Some of the parallel life stories are lost along the way and when the book is over I don’t really understand their contribution to the story itself.

There are thus several unnecessary and time-consuming side tracks that don’t really add anything to the story other than even more lines of text.

The story is also unnecessarily fixated on the appearance and weight of the female characters. I would guess that ten pages of text are devoted just to telling how fat, unattractive, unsightly, and wobbly (plus at least twenty more synonyms for “unfavorable” appearance) the two female main characters are, but the purpose for which this is done is unclear.

The sum total is a terrible disappointment with a flat and not particularly interesting story. Why it needed 716 pages is unclear to me.

People are so foul-mouthed that they barely feel like real people. It feels mostly like shock value, and that made me stop caring in the end.

And then all the sexual violence, which seems to be almost the only violence women can be subjected to, and that’s graphic and over and over again.

I also didn’t like how he portrayed people with non-European backgrounds, like the eight Filipino crew members who were all just as superstitious and willing to let 28 people die, and like the Afghan youths who said things like (I’m paraphrasing) “Sven, fuck my phone. I’ll take yours”. Ugh. No thanks.

I want to like Ajvide Lindqvist, because he’s kind of the biggest name in Swedish horror and I love horror. I like some of his short stories. But this was the last chance I gave him.

• John Ajvide Lindqvist Books