Nine co-workers on a company outing arrive at the idyllic lakeside guesthouse Kolarsjöns Stugby in rural Sweden. They have been working on a project to launch a shopping mall in this remote place for which the land has been taken from local farmers, agreements have been made with shop owners and to build an Ikea around the corner in order to turn the place into a capitalist heaven overlooking the natural beauty. Despite the blatant tensions and conflicting interests within the group, they are trying their best to literally survive this trip and get on with their lives. But there are other tensions brewing too and one of them will result in a proper killing spree – where should they run to, where should they hide? And will they be able to set aside their quarrels in order to pull through together or will they even contribute to the killings?
Phew, this one was intense! I know and love Strandberg’s work but was a little skeptical when I heard nine POVs. Nine! I have to admit that I adjusted just fine though and with their numbers diminishing successively, it wasn’t as strenuous a read as I thought it would be.
Like a rollercoaster, Strandberg builds up the tension painfully slowly until the tipping point, after which the story train catapults with incredible speed into the abyss. That build up includes a lot of character building, and when I mean a lot, I mean 300 whopping pages long background, temper, personality and conflict building of whopping nine people. This, maybe unavoidably, might be seen as both the main strength and the main flaw of Konferensen. On one hand I was anxious and excited for the story to be furthered, on the other hand I was constantly interrupted by quickly rotating points of view. Sometimes a scene is continually described from the eyes of different persons, which was actually pretty neat and the author did not fall into the trap of excessive repetition.
The combination of different types of people and their realness was another plus point for me. In slashers you usually have people taking incredible injuries and keep on running and fighting at superhumanly athletic levels and Strandberg’s characters were like, nope, I can’t anymore! There’s literally a scene where four characters (but also the perpetrator) in the middle of a fight and chase scene sit down and just can’t fight anymore, I loved it!
If that doesn’t convince you, there are also lots of over the top killings and gore, a betrayal story and even nice references to Chrystal Lake and “that” final scene from Halloween, which was awesome.
On a last note – I
unfortunately don’t speak Swedish so I have read the German translation
of this book, there is no
English translation. In times where European authors like Thomas Olde
Heuvelt need to relocate their stories to the USA so it would appeal to
English speaking people, it is sad and disappointing that horror authors from
elsewhere receive so few space, recognition and love for their work,
just saying. Apart from natives, English is also a lingua franca and is for us, people from all over the world, important too because most books aren't even translated into our languages and we depend on English translations. I wish the publishers started seeing us as a market too.
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