Jagannath, Karin Tidbeck

A journalist recounts an encounter with an alien entity that appears throughout human history, a woman creates a creature from her own blood and spit in a can, and a man falls in love with an airship. These are just a couple of the tales to be found in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck's collection of short fiction, Jagannath. The collection has received considerable critical acclaim in the past couple of months, from Tor.com to NPR, and it's easy to see that the attention is well deserved: it's a brilliant book, full of stories that linger long after the words have been read, and the book replaced on the bookshelf.

Jagannath is by far one of the best books that I've picked up this year, a collection of short stories that left me utterly breathless and at the edge of my seat while reading it. More than once, I found myself at the end of a story, only to turn back and begin rereading it immediately. Each story in this short book is a gem, wonderfully crafted and constructed, each leaving me with a shiver of dread and thrill.

What impressed me the most is how utterly normal and natural a vast majority of the stories felt while reading them: normal people encountering something that's just slightly off from what is typically natural. A woman comes out of the woods and marries into a family - supernatural elements may or may not be at play, while a suicidal friend in Rebecka may or may not be insane, or tormented by divine intervention. Other stories are more fantastic, but still utterly grounded, such as the strange call center in Who is Arvid Pekon?, the timeless fairy world in Augusta Prima or the historical encounters with some sort of creature in Pyret. Still others are way out there, such as in Aunts or the title story, Jagannath. In a lot of ways, she does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft ever did himself.

Location figures into this: I've come across several articles and interviews where Tidbeck highlights her home in Sweden, with its long winters as an inspiration for some of the strange occurrences that she's written about. Coming from New England, with its dark geography and short summers, I can certainly relate to the dark atmosphere that has been injected into these stories.

Tidbeck's stories are uniformly haunting, surreal and sublime, and the collection as a whole is a wonder to behold. There's little surprise to see that the book is recommended by such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin and China Miéville, and Jagannath easily falls into the Weird subgenre, as easily as it can be classified into any genre. The stories are a bit odd, and should place Tidbeck on every reader's must-read list from here on out. I for one, can't wait to see what she has coming up next.