{"id":5681,"date":"2016-02-05T14:09:12","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T14:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5681"},"modified":"2016-06-22T17:40:14","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T17:40:14","slug":"listening-to-the-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5681","title":{"rendered":"Listening to the Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=5643\"><em>Editors&#8217; Choice: reviews of<\/em>:\u00a0Johan Theorin,\u00a0<em>The Darkest Room and The Voices Beyond<\/em>;\u00a0Yrsa Sigurdadottir,\u00a0<em>I Remember You and The Silence of the Sea<\/em>; and\u00a0Mark Edwards,\u00a0<em>Follow You Home<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Sigurdardottir_Remember.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-5665\" src=\"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Sigurdardottir_Remember-196x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sigurdardottir_Remember\" width=\"196\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>\u201c\u2018The dead.\u2019 Mirja leaned closer to the wall. \u2018If you just listen \u2026 you can hear them whispering.&#8217;\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The whispering dead in Johan Theorin\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Darkest Room<\/em>\u00a0are an essential part of the book\u2019s dark, eerie atmosphere. Their whispers haunt characters who are struggling to come to terms with the crimes of the past. This conjunction of crime fiction and the supernatural has been treated in two fascinating recent studies: Sian MacArthur\u2019s\u00a0<em>Crime and the Gothic<\/em>\u00a0(2011) and Michael Cook\u2019s\u00a0<em>Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text<\/em>\u00a0(2014). Both discuss crime fiction\u2019s underlying affinity with the gothic, analyzing the numerous ways it deploys the structures, language and imagery of supernatural horror and the ghost story.<\/p>\n<p>In this review, we\u2019re looking at a small selection of excellent novels published over the past few years that have brought echoes of the Gothic into crime fiction. Scandinavian writers have been particularly successful in creating crime narratives that incorporate ancestral beliefs in ghosts, premonitions, and other supernatural phenomena. We highly recommend the work of two of the most powerful and compelling Nordic crime writers, the Swedish author of the \u00d6land Quartet, Johan Theorin, and the Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdadottir: our review includes Theorin\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Darkest Room<\/em>\u00a0(2009) and\u00a0<em>The Voices Beyond\u00a0<\/em>(2015); and Sigurdadottir\u2019s\u00a0<em>I Remember You<\/em>\u00a0(2012) and\u00a0<em>The Silence of the Sea\u00a0<\/em>(2014). An inclination towards gothic themes is also evident in a range of other contemporary crime novels. Sian MacArthur discusses, for example, the work of Gerritson, Slaughter and Rankin, amongst others, and our own review focuses on a tense and disquieting gothic noir thriller by Mark Edwards,\u00a0<em>Follow You Home<\/em>\u00a0(2015). In the work of all three of the writers reviewed here, living characters listen fearfully to the voices of the dead. Whether or not the ghosts assume an undeniable reality, these deeply unsettling reminders of past acts of violence tear characters from any secure sense of day-to-day reality, reshaping the course of their lives. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=5643\">Read all of our reviews of Johan Theorin, Yrsa Sigurrottir and Mark Edwards.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editors&#8217; Choice: reviews of:\u00a0Johan Theorin,\u00a0The Darkest Room and The Voices Beyond;\u00a0Yrsa Sigurdadottir,\u00a0I Remember You and The Silence of the Sea;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5681\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Listening to the Ghosts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":5811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5809,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions\/5809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}