Isolation for
From his cabin in a boggy Swedish forest, Will Dean crafts tales full of creepiness and claustrophobia. He talks to Craig Sisterson about returning to the Fens in his new novel.
Snow crunched underfoot as the travellers broke through the trees into the small clearing where a tiny hut stood. They’d hiked a few miles into the forest, once their car ran out of road. These last steps a frigid coda to a journey that began 1000km away, finally arriving on foot in the wintry darkness after a planes, trains, and automobiles sort of trip.
They looked around, and at each other, and they knew.
“I just love the soul of this land,” was the reaction Will Dean says came to his heart and mind as he stood for the first time in that clearing in a massive elk forest north of Gothenburg, Sweden.
A book-loving kid from the small villages and farming landscapes of the English Midlands, Dean was working among the hustle and bustle of London finance. A temporary means to an end. He and his Swedish wife were saving hard for a different life. Now they’d found it.
“The listing was like ‘compost toilet in a shed, a hut, no road access or water, great mushrooms and blueberries’,” recalls Dean with a laugh. “A boggy clearing in a forest, it was cheap as hell because no Swedes wanted to live there! I emailed my wife and she said ‘I like mushrooms and blueberries,’ so we flew over to see it. The realtor was shocked anyone wanted to see the place.”
But Dean and his wife loved the isolation that scared others away. They wanted to live in the forest, build a wooden house themselves, live a simple life surrounded by nature. So they did.
More than a decade after the couple first hiked into that elk forest, I’m talking to Dean by video chat ahead of the release of his fourth novel, The Last Thing to Burn. His new book is an intense, claustrophobic psychological thriller centred on “Jane”, a Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in the UK in a shipping container. She’s married to Lenn, a quietly terrifying man who acts like they have a nice life in their dilapidated farmhouse, isolated among the bleak landscapes of the Fens. But for Jane it’s an open prison; escape seems impossible, attempts are punished. Dean’s novel is a tense character study that grapples with the horrors of human trafficking.
The idea for The Last Thing to Burn struck Dean at midnight in the forest a few years ago. One of the most anticipated thrillers of 2021, it secured “the forest author” substantial publishing deals on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, with Covid still raging across Europe and North America, Dean won’t be doing any travelling or in-person events to support its release.
But other than the lack of travel the past year, Dean and his family — which has expanded with a young son, now attending school in a neighbouring forest, and a St Bernard — have largely been living the same type of life they have every year since they moved into their forest home in 2012.
“We’re lucky,” says Dean from the old wooden hut that’s become his writing office. “This year’s been so tough for so many people but we’re kind of built for the apocalypse here. We’re off the grid and the stuff I need to do in terms of writing, nothing’s changed there. The stuff I want to do in terms of reading, nothing’s changed. The stuff I need to do outside growing our food and chopping wood is the same as usual, so it’s been a nice kind of year. I would have liked a little more travel but I’ve been able to see my kid more and work more, so it’s been pretty good.”
Visiting the forest all those years ago proved life-changing for Dean in more ways than one.
It was around that time, working in finance in London but knowing it wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life, that Dean began wondering if he could turn his love of reading stories into something else. “I thought maybe I could write a book — but I’m not going to tell anybody because my mates and my family are just going to laugh at me. So I just worked on my craft.”
While Dean didn’t move to the forest to become a writer (rather to create a simple life away from the crowds, surrounded by nature and space), it was in the forest — and maybe because of it — he became one.
A few years after they moved to central Sweden, Dean was outside playing with his son, then a toddler. It was autumn. Elk-hunting season had begun, so gunfire would regularly echo through the pines. Dean realised how used to it he’d become, then began to wonder what if one of the rifle shots wasn’t aimed at an elk? How easy would it be to mask a murder among the chorus?
That thought, and the compelling character of Tuva Moodyson, sparked the manuscript that became Dean’s word-of-mouth hit debut, Dark Pines. Tuva came in a forest vision: Dean saw a bird’s-eye view of an overgrown pine forest, similar to his own. He “zoomed in” and saw a ute driving along a rough gravel track. He zoomed further, looked through the window and saw a young woman with hearing aids. He started writing for her point of view and things clicked.
Tuva works for a local newspaper in Gavrik, a small town surrounded by the wild Utgart forest that that has a Grimm’s fairy tales sense of creepiness and menace. In Dark Pines she investigates after a body is found shot in the woods, mutilated in a way that echoes