Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist

A child’s disappearance leads her father to plumb mysteries that were better left alone in this atmospheric horror story by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist.

During a family trip to an historic lighthouse off the coast of Sweden, six-year-old Maja vanishes. Two years later, her broken father Anders returns to the island where she disappeared, to drink himself to death and/or lay her ghost to rest. This is the island where he spent summers with his fisherman father growing up, the island where his grandparents live—but now everything is unfamiliar. He's haunted wherever he goes by the feeling of being watched, and his daughter’s things, abandoned after her disappearance, seem to be forming into messages for him when he’s not looking.

His grandfather Simon was once a well-known magician. For fifty years he’s lived on the island, but he’s still an outsider to those whose ancestors settled there long ago. Nevertheless, Simon has a deep and secret tie to the island—an unpleasant magic that is more than mere illusion, and that may be the key to what happened to Maja, and many others.

From the ancient past, from the grandparents' past, from Anders’ childhood and adolescence, pieces of the dark mystery are revealed, each one ratcheting up the feeling of tense unease. Can Anders and Simon comprehend what’s going on in time to recover Maja? And more importantly, should they?

Harbor is sprinkled with pop culture references from the 1980’s, when Anders was a teen, and flavored with a foreign feel that’s more substantial than the slight awkwardness of translation. Ajvide Lindqvist has more authorly presence than is customary in American horror, giving the book a literary gloss.

Land and sea. We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them: the sea, and the land. If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are this many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, those streets. […] But the sea. the sea is something completely different. The sea is one . . .

Ajvide Lindqvist is also the creator of Let the Right One In, a very chilling Swedish horror movie, blogged by Jennifer K. in February of 2010.