Title: Stallo

Author: Stefan Spjut

Release date: January 1st, 2012

Just yesterday, in the review I posted, I mentioned how I love the strange ways books end up on a readers radar. Well, today’s review is another one with a mildly fun case of ‘how’d I learn of this book!’ It was actually Adam Nevill who shared that he’d read Spjut’s novel ‘Trolls,’ which turned out to be the sequel to ‘Stallo.’ Unbeknownst to him, Adam had read book two first before diving back into book one. Hearing that he’d loved it and knowing how Adam’s own books have ingrained themselves in my reading brain, I snagged ‘Stallo.’ But I did hesitate for one main reason. Page count. At just over 600 pages, I had to find a moment where I mentally wanted to commit to a book that voluminous. I can zip through novellas and even novels up to 400 pages, but as soon as I know a book is over 400 pages, my brain seems to categorize that as something else. As though I’ve gone from watching a single episode of a TV show to suddenly committing to watching the entirety of the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions in one go.

But, this one kept calling to me. Look at the opening of the synopsis – ‘In the summer of 1978 a young boy disappears without trace from a summer cabin in the woods. His mother claims that he was abducted by a giant. The boy is never found.

The previous year, over in a Swedish National Park, a wildlife photographer takes a strange picture from his small airplane, of a bear running over the marshes. On its back sits a creature, which the photographer claims is something extraordinary.’

HELLO, THIS BOOK SOUNDS PERFECT. It checks all of my boxes. Woods. Check. Creatures. Check. WTF is going on? Check. It was time to dive in. And so, I cracked this open (in reality, just went to it on my Kindle) and dove in, not completely aware of the wonderful world Spjut was about to introduce me to.

What I liked: The book starts off exactly as the synopsis bit says. Magnus, a young boy, goes to a cabin in the woods with his mother. There, they have some fun and he goes exploring. Not long after, they see some wild animals lurking around, a fox making itself known. Then, when the mother sees something odd outside, Magnus wants to see and before she can stop him, he rushes outside, where a massive being grabs him and he’s gone.

Fast forward twenty-five years later and we meet Susso, a young woman who believes her grandfather managed to take a photo of a small troll on the back of a bear. She runs a website around the photo and other stories similar. She’s contacted by a woman who believes a forest person is visiting her home. Then, that woman’s grandson is kidnapped seemingly at random, but soon it appears that its related to the stories of the trolls and shapeshifters that hide in the woods.

From here ,Spjut takes us on a rollercoaster of Susso, her mother and her former boyfriend, racing around Sweden in search of clues and hoping to find where this boy, Mattias, was taken. We get a ton of really great folklore intertwined and we even get a really great introduction of John Bauer and his role in the troll history. I do have to say, in my life, I’ve always seen trolls as massive beings and never really considered them in the smaller forms or shapeshifting forms, so huge thanks to my friend Espen Aukan who answered some of my questions regarding the Sami people, the Stallo folklore and some troll related questions!

The final quarter of the novel is jam-packed with action, revelations and we get to learn more about who these big trolls were/are and how we could potentially end up with a sequel, which was released in 2017.

What I didn’t like: This book does have a lot of slow down spots, particularly when time is spent with the trio going from hotel to hotel and we get limited movement of the major chess pieces. It has moments that come off as bloated and I’m not sure if that is due to translation – I suspect Swedish might be more succinct than English – or if the novel itself tried to include too much small subplots, but at times I had to step away for a day or two, when it just felt like nothing was happening.

Additionally, I wasn’t a fan of the majority of the story being told in third person, but a first person shift would come whenever it was being focused on Susso’s mom. That was an often grating shift and I found the book would lose its momentum.

Why you should buy this: Overall, I did really enjoy this, if not the slower moments. But man alive, when this thing fired, it fired on all cylinders. We got some phenomenal scenes in the woods, in apartments with a squirrel and even at an old farmhouse complex in the middle of nowhere. The folklore elements were great, really having my imagination run wild and the historical elements that Spjut sprinkled throughout were wonderful.

This was a novel that I greatly enjoyed and one I’m glad to have tackled. I’m still on the fence about reading the sequel, but who knows, the mountains often call my name and when its a troll whispering it on the wind, that pull is sometimes too hard to ignore.

4/5