"Glaskroppar" by Erik Axl Sund

Blue whales, massively teasing teenagers to suicide, are afraid not only in Russia, but also in Sweden: the novel Erik Axl Sund (two people took refuge under this pseudonym at once - Swedish musicians Jerker Eriksson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist, already famous for the detective trilogy "Victoria Bergman" ) is based, in essence, on a similar mythology. In different parts of Sweden, teenagers are found who have committed suicide in a variety of ways. Only one thing unites them: at the time of death, they all listened to the cassette (yes, yes, it was the cassette!) With strange, frightening music — the same type, but each time a little different.

Police Commissioner Jens Hurtig, who once survived his beloved sister's suicide (and therefore experiencing mixed feelings because of an investigation), quickly finds out that invisible threads are drawn from all these deaths to a mysterious dark metal artist named Hunger. . However, what drives Hunger, how does he relate to the unfortunate boys and girls, how their contacts are technically organized (and are they anyway?), And whether all these tragic incidents are connected with a single murder and a single suicide of a fundamentally different type - Questions to find the answer will not immediately. In essence, there will be no final answer: "Glaskroppar" is only the first part of the trilogy, and not all the knots that originated in the novel are destined to unleash it.

Erik Axl Sund, obviously, diligently injects a suffocating, gloomy atmosphere in the novel: auto-aggression, drugs, violence, social distress, and frank madness literally flow from the pages of "Glaskroppar". However, despite all the author's efforts, the reader will inevitably see a completely different there - a much more encouraging and blissful picture: a small cozy country, where everyone is somehow familiar with each other. Where refugees (one of the main characters - a beautiful Muslim woman with a dizzying name Aiman Chernikova, arrived in Stockholm as a refugee from the former USSR) can rely on support and protection, where they tinker with difficult adolescents until the last day, and the state boarding school for mentally ill people looks like a good Family hotel premium. In a word, it is scary, of course, but not so much so - rather, rather simply entertaining.