I must admit, when it comes to reviewing books, I do have a soft spot for an anthology.
Even when it doesn’t wholly work, there are so many original ideas spliced into 300+ pages that makes them a fascinating read. Nordic Visions, as the title suggests, is a collection of short genre fiction compiled by Margret Helgadottir.
What Helgadottir does is split Scandinavia up into the particular countries, so Sweden, Denmark, The Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway and Finland and uses them as chapters for each short story from said country.
What comes through in a lot of the stories is the otherness, as for non-Nordic readers we are exploring different landscapes, with different climates and characters maybe a lot more complex than we may have read about previously.
We get tales of haunted houses, post-apocalyptic futures, with blends of science, mythology and natural themes.
One of my personal highlights was Helgadottir’s own tale A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen, which is about a celebrity lion that has gone missing. It’s not the story you expect and you become emotionally invested in what could be such a throwaway tale; that’s the power of the words on the page.
Conclusively, Nordic Visions, which comprises 35 tales in one book, is a thrilling collection of diverse tales that will excite, entertain and scare some readers.
Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction is available now from Solaris.
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