Chilling Lit: Six Novels in Translation That Blend Folktales and Horror

Togetherness that’s on the side of suffocating, history that won’t stay put or past, and nature that doesn’t just exist, benignly, but watches and waits….Folk horror deals in dissonance, dread, and moral ambiguity, the land remembers all manner of things (not all of them nice) and safety may be bought but not cheaply.

It suggests that other and different sentience exists beside us without much reference to human habits, timescales, desires and activities. And that attracting the attention of these others, these “neighbors,” is usually not a good thing.

So imagine if Buffy (snarky youngsters) and The Witcher (cursed villages, not-human things just looking to live their best lives) got stuck Under the Dome (you can check out any time you want… oh, and beware of…you know, people) and you get Darya Bobyleva’s The Village at the Edge of Noon (trans. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse). I loved its sardonic delivery and a kaleidoscopic plot that clicks into place like a puzzle—so much that I had to translate it.

When time stops one hot summer day and the road out vanishes, not everyone is displeased with the changes, even when the sparse little woods turn into an impassable forest and the river brims with strange, seductive voices. The young people, bereft of WI-Fi and purpose, look for escape routes and discover that history is sticky.

The older generations are hardier and more pragmatic: “I’ve survived the communists, I’ve survived the capitalists, and I’ll get along with whatever’s in charge now, too.” But everyone is about to find out about the terrible wisdom of crowds, the price of nostalgia and the cost of making deals with monsters.

While classic folk horror relies on a basic recipe—an isolated setting, a landscape that feels hostile, or at best indifferent but uncomfortably alert, ossified rituals against an unspoken, watchful threat, beauty that invokes dread, paganism and not-fun festivals, insular communities a little too keen on conformity—in translation, we can taste the terrors particular to other cultures and other landscapes.

Here’s a reading list of translated fiction that will make you quiver, shiver, and think twice about crossing invisible lines.

*

Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream (trans. Megan McDowell)

South America has given us much contemporary body, ecology and folk horror, and I’m still not over Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (trans. Megan McDowell). A little boy sits by a dying woman’s bedside, interrogating her about how she got there, and pushing her to remember “the worms,” a hidden danger. Years before, he almost died after drinking poisoned river water, then an Argentine folk ritual saved his life—but maybe not his soul.

The deep horror here is environmental, and this is a perfect example of slow, atmospheric mood-setting that lulls you into a false sense of security. A whole lot of not very much happens—until you suddenly find yourself creeped out of your skin.

I could also mention Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (trans. Sophie Hughes), a modern folk horror where a murder is a flashpoint for decades of violence, superstition and malice in a monstrous Mexican town, or the too-memorable Brazilian slaughterhouse in Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle and Men (trans. Zoe Perry), to name a very few.

Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Magallanes, The Book of Denial (trans. Lawrence Schimel)

Not folk horror in the strictest sense but one that gets right under your skin and means to claw its way out is a stunning graphic novel, or perhaps more aptly, an illustrated performance: The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda & Alejandro Magallanes (trans. Lawrence Schimel) uses the Mexican Dia de los Muertos as a jumping-off point for—in its own words—”the worst story in the world.”

A little boy discovers how inexplicably cruel the real world can be—has been—to children, when he pages through the book his father is writing and begins to comprehend that the real monsters—people—are with us every day. “How can you see letters without wanting to read them?”—curiosity as one of the staple drivers of horror plots.

Zuzana Ríhová, Playing Wolf (trans. Alex Zucker)

Over to Europe and Playing Wolf by Zuzana Ríhová (trans. Alex Zucker), a vivisection of a yuppie couple who move to a remote Czech village as a cure for their troubled marriage, to find that the villagers are not exactly wholesome and also seriously disinclined to welcoming the newcomers.

Some disturbing local rituals and sinister noises outside their cottage later, the couple’s young son vanishes, in this sly, sharp tale with a nod to fairy tales about hunters and hunted.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (trans. Ebba Segerberg)

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (trans. Ebba Segerberg) concerns a bullied Swedish boy befriended by another lonely soul—a vampire living as a young girl. Lindqvist confidently relocates the dread and isolation of a rural hamlet to a comfortless brutalist housing estate, and his supernatural creature—in the wrong time and place—is as tragic as it is chilling.

For more cold-climate shivers also see Finnish Weird, a quirky and often surprisingly spooky literary trove from the lands of the midnight sun.

Halldor Laxness, Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson)

A young naif is sent to a remote Icelandic locale to investigate the rumors of a priest gone rogue in Nobel prize-winner Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson). Our narrator arrives at the foot of Snaeffels volcano, prosaically, by bus—but, in the end, hightails it back “hoping that I would find the main road again.”

The local version of Christianity is doctrinally suspect, the community leader engages him in cryptic, circular conversation, and the femme fatale is a woman straight out of the sagas—so far so Wicker Man—but Laxness’s jeu d’esprit novella is both a spoof and deeply serious, satiric and philosophical, not horror-ful but very charming in a quietly absurd, rather Scandinavian way.

Karina Shaynian, Saspyga

P.S.: Currently keeping me awake is Saspyga by Karina Shaynian—a gothic, metaphysical western where two women are both lost and not lost in the vast Altai mountains where Europe and Asia meet. Mounted on horses that are both living and dead, they’re on the trail of a mythical creature they both dread and desire.

The beauty and terror of the landscape says more than the taciturn locals could ever hope or want to explain, and temporal loops lead our heroines not just astray, but on an existential journey. Is it giving me the don’t-look-in-the-mirror folk horror feels? Oh yes. Would I love to translate it into English? Publishers, form an orderly queue!

________________________________________

When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu and in translation by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse is available via Angry Robot.