Book Review

By Derryll White

Fossum, Karin (2014).  Hellfire.

                  “Peace be with your dust.”

Karin Fossum does not mess around.  From the cover photo on ‘Hellfire’ is foreboding, dark, presses down on an earth devoid of lightness and joy.  Bonnie Hayden worked as home help in northern Sweden.  She saw people in their worst, despairing situations and tried to make their life a little better.  Her son Simon was her single ray of sunshine and he started each day with a tantrum as he was going to daycare.  Fossum paints heavily with a black brush.  Inspector Sejer’s dog, Frank, is getting old and feeling his age morosely, as is Sejer himself.

Eddie Mathe lives with his 56-year-old mom, who worries incessantly about what will become of the disadvantaged twenty-one-year-old man.  His prospects without his mom are not good.  She puzzles about him, a riddle she only partly understands.

Fossum does here what she does best – develops complete characters and places them in small rural Nordic towns.  They work out their abbreviated destinies just as the reader does, completely and with reason

The author covers several themes, all to do with what one does with one’s life.  This is not an easy road.  Loneliness, differentness, age.  These are all things the reader is familiar with. How Fossum resolves them may strike some fear into a few hearts.  Read with caution – but definitely read.

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Excerpts from the novel:

TATTOO – He studied the tattoo on her left shoulder, a small lizard that looked as though it was creeping over to her collarbone.  It had probably been there for a few years – it wasn’t black any more, more bluish-green.

    “In a way, a tattoo is the same as self-harming,” Snorrason said.

    “In what way?”

    “Well, it hurts.  It shows a need to be noticed.  And It’s permanent.  Like when young girls cut themselves and then later sit there running their fingers over the scars.”

ALZHEIMER’S – “How has he reacted to what has happened?” Skarre asked, with some care.

    “I have to tell him again every morning.  He only remembers one day at a time.  Sometimes not even that, it’s impossible.  I have to watch him like a child.”

    “What does he say>?”

    “He doesn’t know who Bonnie is any more.”

    Henny Hayden lit a cigarette.

    “I had to tell him why we were at the funeral, but he just seemed to be confused.  People suffering from Alzheimer’s live with a great deal of fear, each day is new to them and so are the people.”

    She looked at them over the table.

    “My retirement has not been what I hoped it would be,” she said.  “And I’m only seventy.  What if I live for another twenty years with this misery?”

 – Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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