Bi Book Club: Dark Pines

By Siobhan Ball

September 07, 2019

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Photo credit: Unsplash/Christian Kielberg

Will Dean's Dark Pines is a Nordic Noir featuring the rarest of things, a disabled bisexual protagonist.

Tuva Moodyson is a deaf journalist stuck in a small Swedish town while her mother slowly loses the battle with cancer. Terrified of the forest that surrounds her as a result of her father's death, the novel opens on Tuva facing a death that parallels her father's as an enraged bull elk charges her car. Though there is one jarring moment in the opening sequence that almost had me put the book down — note to male authors, when a woman thinks she's about to be skewered through the eyebrows, she does not bother to note they've been threaded. Dean managed to surprise me because Tuva turned out to be an incredibly well-written bi woman whose deafness and mental health issues also rang true.

Be warned that SPOILERS follow.

Despite living in the sort of place where news is a rarity, Tuva has the chance to make her career when a serial killer or a very clever copycat re-emerges after twenty years of inactivity. Known as the Medusa killer, thanks to a calling card of removing the victims' eyes and taking them away from the scene, there seems to be no pattern among the victims other than the fact that they're all men. Unfortunately for Tuva, this means a lot of time traipsing through the forests and interviewing the sinister people who live there — including the isolated ghostwriter everyone blamed for the killings last time and the troll carving sisters who include human body parts among their mixed media.

As the case gets more and more attention, the town starts to turn on Tuva, believing her coverage is giving them a bad reputation and likely to discourage the tourists they depend on. As she's becoming increasingly isolated, she starts to suspect the killer, or maybe someone else is stalking her. Her suspicion is confirmed when creepy trolls carved by the sisters start turning up at her apartment. It's at this point that the plot really ratchets up, with a different person looking responsible for the murders from moment to moment. Though I did at one point correctly guess the killer, I quickly dismissed that theory in favor of another, and it was both delightful and infuriating to have that suspicion confirmed at the end.

A young woman wearing a yellow jacket, looking up in the middle of a dark and dense forrest.
Bigstock/ikostudio

Despite his earlier misstep with the eyebrows, Dean seems very good at portraying experiences other than his own. There's one scene in particular with a taxi driver who stops the car on an isolated road to ask Tuva out, something familiar to every woman even if the setting of their experience varies, and Dean manages to convey the completely reasonable fear and danger she feels. Even when the man turns out to be inept but well-meaning rather than dangerous, Dean makes no attempt to characterize Tuva's response as unreasonable or paranoid, as so many men do when women discuss these experiences in real life. He may not experience the same vulnerabilities as his characters, but he doesn't try and write them off as imaginary or overplayed either.

I was particularly impressed by the way her hearing loss is handled, realistically impacting her decisions and experiences without turning her into inspiration or tragedy porn. Tuva battles the constant rain to keep her hearing aids from shorting out, and the way she compensates for what she can't hear through a combination of lip-reading and filling in the blanks was highly relatable for me as a person with (albeit mild) hearing loss. Similarly, Tuva's mental health problems, stemming from her father's death during her childhood and the way her mother detached emotionally, are believable without being sensationalized. We see how they impact her life and the way that she relates to other people without focusing on them in a way that detracts from the main storyline.

The book cover of dark pines that has a clear divide between the snow and the dense forrest.

The handling of her bisexuality felt similar, a smoothly integrated part of her personality rather than something clunkily shoehorned in for token diversity or fetishization. Tuva doesn't use the word bisexual when she comes out to an older, disapproving friend; that in itself felt realistic and reflective of the way many of us have tried to handle similar situations. The author isn't avoiding the word, Tuva is, in the hopes that somehow that avoidance will render her sexuality more palatable to the beloved conservative in question. It doesn't, of course. These things never do, and Dean's matter-of-fact handling of it strikes exactly the right note. It's neither maudlin nor dismissive, these things just are, and Tuva, like the rest of us, gets on with it.

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