Anders Fager
Culti svedesi

The book Culti svedesi by Anders Fager is finally available in Italy thanks to Edizioni Hypnos. Indeed, the book was published 10 years ago in Sweden. Anders Fager presented it in Italy at Stranimondi, where I had the opportunity to be present. It is a kind of homage to the "Lovecraftian" universe, as can be seen from the subtitle Nine Visions of the Universe of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, Fager, during the conference, stated that Lovecraft was a writer whose style was "outdated" and that he was mediocre, and he does not understand why his figure arouses interest. Fortunately, not everyone agrees. Valerio Evangelisti claims that Lovecraft "writes like a god," while Fruttero and Lucentini found his style "aristocratic".

And now let's get to the book in question. Anders Fager seems to be influenced, more than by Lovecraft, by Clive Barker although I admit he has his own personal imagery, making him original and different from much current horror. There was also talk of James Ellroy but honestly, I did not find it, at least in this book.

In the end, the deities of the “Lovecraftian” Pantheon have a purely citationist value. In the first story— The Furies of Borås—we find a coven of girls devoted to the cult of Shub Niggurath. The story is indeed not bad and has its own power: Fager's style is simple and sharp as a blade and it leads us to the heart of a Swedish forest where a boy (referred to as “the Ox”) will finally be sacrificed to Shub Niggurath. The following story—The Grandmother's Journey—has an agitated style and is perhaps the best of this collection. It tells of the journey of 2 strange siblings from Sweden to Slovenia (during the war in the former Yugoslavia) to bring home their Grandmother hidden in a convent in Slovenia. The Grandmother is a person who is inferred to have monstrous features and a close kinship with Yog Sothoth. During this "journey to the end of the night" the anomalies are gradually revealed. The Desire of a Broken Man is set during the Thirty Years' War and this time we find the ancient Lappish deity Ittakkva who is summoned to avenge the massacre carried out by the Swedish army. Happily Ever After in Östermalm takes place in the exclusive district of Östermalm in Stockholm where 2 fiancés move after meeting a character who turns out to be a kind of sorcerer. It is a story of possession and personality exchange and a paranoid urban horror that doesn’t leave one indifferent. Miss Witt's Masterpiece, on the other hand, takes us inside a modern art gallery where Miss Witt shocks the audience with an exhibition of pornographic photographs. But contact with a phantom "Carcosa Foundation" leads her to conceive something even more extreme. The ending is very macabre and surreal.

In the background of these stories looms the current Swedish and European society, described in a squalid manner where a reality made of loneliness and desolation emerges. In this aspect, perhaps we find "the horror of reality" and the discomfort of modern man that Lovecraft spoke of.

Available on the Edizoni Hypnos website at the following link: http://www.edizionihypnos.com/.

Anders Fager, Culti svedesi, tr. by Fulvio Ferrari, Hypnos, pp. 266, euros 16.90