In the 1950s, the people that occupied a mining village in rural Sweden vanished, leaving only empty homes, a corpse in the town square, and lots of unanswered questions. The stuff of local legend, documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl - and her connection is personal. Her grandmother's entire family went missing. In a quest to find answers, Alice assembles a team to travel to the ghost town, and using her great aunt's letters to her grandmother as a guide, they set out to film their findings over the period of a week. Effectively cut-off from civilization, Alice's team quickly realize that they are in over their heads as equipment is destroyed, team members are injured, and readers begin to realize that Alice might not be the most reliable narrator.

'The Lost Village' by Camilla Sten sounded exactly like the kind of book that I would want to read. Hailed as a mix of Midsommar meets The Blair Witch Project, it is these things...and it isn't. 'The Lost Village' is a good book. The pacing is great, we begin with an intertextual framework that reveals the mystery and the major players right at the beginning. The characters begin to develop over the following chapters as we move back and forth between present day timelines with Alice's crew and back to the summer of 1959 with Alice's great aunt and great grandmother as narrators. The perspective of the great aunt is revealed to us in the letters she sent to Alice's grandmother that are inserted as chapter breaks. This was initially confusing until I was able to firmly grasp the characters in my mind, but that might not be everyone's experience.

The doom-tracker slowly increases as we begin to realize just how isolated the village is. Add to this lurking shadows in the background, sinister giggling, and a faulty narrator(s) and you have a shifty story that lets all the creepy feelings in.

'The Lost Village' really had my attention right up until the end. The author gives us a good story, but where I expect to feel catharsis after a horror movie (per the publicity surrounding the descriptive copy) I was instead left feeling incredibly sad as the mystery of the 'lost village' is revealed in full. This is an incredibly dark book. Dark in ways that I did not see coming or expected. The writing is dynamic, cinematic, and the story is a proper scary story, but the ending didn't work for me. 'The Lost Village' is not a bad book, not by a long shot. But it was just ok.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for sharing a digital ARC with me in exchange for an honest review.