The Lake of the Dead

by André Bjerke, James D. Jenkins

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

A 1942 classic that has been voted Norway's all-time best thriller, a brilliant mix of mystery and the supernatural

Deep in the darkest part of the Norwegian woods stands Dead Man's Cabin, where 110 years ago a madman slew his sister and her lover, throwing their decapitated corpses in a nearby lake before drowning himself to join them in death. Ever since, the cabin has been cursed, and anyone who spends the night there is possessed by the killer's spirit and infected with his madness.

Bjørn Werner, a young scholar from Oslo, ignored the old superstitions and bought the cabin as a place to read and work in quiet. Now he has disappeared, and the evidence suggests he threw himself in the lake in a fit of insanity. The police write it off as a suicide, but those who knew him are not so sure. Could the curse actually be real? Bjørn's sister and five of his friends travel to the cabin to look into his death, but not all of them will return alive from their stay at the Lake of the Dead ...

André Bjerke's The Lake of the Dead (1942) was voted the all-time best Norwegian thriller, and its atmospheric 1958 film adaptation is regarded as one of Norway's best films. This new translation is the first-ever American publication of Bjerke's classic, which features an unusual mixture of murder mystery and supernatural horror that will keep readers guessing until the thrilling conclusion.

"Bjerke's forgotten classic, with an excellent new translation, allows the creepy setting, menacing tone, and very real danger of the compelling and engaging story to shine in all its 1940s glory for a modern audience." - Library Journal

 

Read more

Release date: February 15, 2022

Publisher: Valancourt Books

Print pages: 206

Sample

 

In 2001, a Norwegian newspaper conducted a poll to determine the all-time best Norwegian crime novel. The winner was André Bjerke’s The Lake of the Dead (1942), which beat the second-place finisher, a 1996 thriller by Karin Fossum, by over twenty percentage points. In a couple of similar polls conducted in more recent years, Bjerke has been knocked from the top spot by newer bestsellers by international superstars Fossum and Jo Nesbø, but even after all these years The Lake of the Dead never places lower than third. Given the book’s enduring popularity in its own country (where it has also been filmed twice) and considering the appetite of American and British audiences for Nordic Noir over the past twenty-five years or so, it’s surprising that no enterprising publisher has dusted off Bjerke’s classic to make it available to a wider audience before now.

‘But wait,’ some readers are no doubt already saying, ‘what’s this about crime novels? Surely with a title like The Lake of the Deadand a cover like this one, it must be a horror novel, not a crime one, right?’ The short answer is that it’s a bit of both. To the extent that it involves a mysterious death and the efforts of the dead man’s friends to investigate the matter and get to the bottom of it, it unquestion­ably follows the structure of a crime or mystery novel. And yet many of the specific plot points of the book – an abandoned cabin in the woods, a century-old curse, possession by an evil spirit, a lake with the paranormal power to suck victims down to their doom in its bottomless depths, a dead man said to return from beyond the grave – are much more closely aligned with the horror genre. It’s worth noting that Bjerke wasn’t the only author of the period to explore the possibilities of fusing crime and horror. Agatha Christie’sAnd Then There Were None (1939) reads for all the world like a supernatural horror novel until a rational explanation is finally presented at the end, while John Dickson Carr took the opposite approach in The Burning Court (1937), offering a controversial twist ending that suggested a supernatural solution to the mystery. Bjerke knew both authors’ works well (indeed both are mentioned explicitly by name in The Lake of the Dead), and he knew the possibilities and risks of introducing the supernatural into a mystery novel. To find out which approach Bjerke ultimately follows – a supernatural explanation or a rationalized one – you’ll have to read the book.

If Norwegian critics have typically overlooked the book’s supernatural or horror aspects and focused on the book only as a crime novel, it may be because (as discussed in the first volume of our The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories) Norway is one of the only Western European countries with essentially no tradition of horror fiction. In the 1970s, when horror was booming worldwide, with hit books and films like Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, one Norwegian publisher thought to capitalize on the current appetite for horror and enlisted (who else?) André Bjerke, Norway’s closest thing to a horror author, to edit two volumes of horror stories, one from Norway and the other from the rest of the world. The international book proved to be no problem for Bjerke – it came out in 1975 and contained most of the usual suspects, including Poe, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Conan Doyle; Bjerke even translated many of the tales into Norwegian himself. The second book, an anthology of Norwegian horror, was trickier. In fact, Bjerke recounts in the foreword that he had misgivings about the assignment because he thought the material was too scant. In the end he did manage to compile a slim volume of Norwegian horror, though he helped himself by padding out the page count with one story of his own, two by his father, and a translation of ‘William and Mary’ by British author Roald Dahl, whose parents happened to be Norwegian. Given that Norway has virtually no horror fiction to speak of, it would be fair to say that The Lake of the Dead, although typically classified as a crime novel, is one of the closest things to a horror novel to be found there.

But to pigeonhole Bjerke as merely a genre writer, an author of popular thrillers, would be a mistake. During his lifetime he was arguably better known for his poetry than his novels. His first collection came out in 1940 when he was only 22 and earned wide acclaim; he would go on to publish well over a dozen more volumes of verse for adults and children throughout his career and is still highly regarded for his achievements today. Proficient in English, French, and German, Bjerke was also a prolific translator, bringing many of the world’s classics to Norwegian audiences, including Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, Racine, Poe, Kipling, Hesse and Rilke, just to name a few. He was an extremely cultured and well-read man – as readers will see from the many erudite allusions to be found in The Lake of the Dead.

After the Nazis occupied Norway in June 1940, Bjerke made the leap from poetry to thrillers. This may have been in part because of financial considerations – after all, writing popular novels has almost always paid better than poetry – or perhaps the extremely creative young Bjerke wanted to try another outlet for expressing his ideas. Or it might simply have had to do with the fact that poetry, with its inherent ability to contain hidden layers of meaning, would have had a harder time getting past the German censors.

Like his contemporary Graham Greene, who distinguished between his more serious novels and his thrillers (which he labeled ‘entertainments’), Bjerke sought to put some distance between his poetry and his genre fiction, publishing the latter under the pseudonym of ‘Bernhard Borge’. His first novel, Nattmennesket, which translates literally as The Night Person, appeared when he was just 23; it would be the first of four novels published under the Borge moniker. In an early example of what we might call metafiction, Borge is presented not only as the author of Bjerke’s novel, but also its main character: the tale is recounted in the first person by a middling crime author named Bernhard Borge. The trustworthiness of Borge’s account is emphasized by his surname, which is a verb in Norwegian meaning ‘to guarantee’ or ‘to vouch for’. Though no knowledge of the first book is necessary to understand and enjoy The Lake of the Dead (the novels are both stand-alone stories), it might be worth giving a brief summary of it here, since not much information about it is available in English.

Bjerke’s debut novel opens with Bernhard Borge traveling to a weekend house party at the home of his uncle, Helge Gårholm, a notorious womanizer who adheres to the philosophy of ‘love ’em and leave ’em’ – his favorite pastime is to make women fall in love with him, then dump them flat and break their hearts. In addition to his nephew, Helge has invited a few male friends and several beautiful women, including his current fling and his most recent ex. In the course of the night, he is found murdered, his throat slashed and his head nearly sawed off by a serrated knife. A detective from Oslo named Hammer – no relation to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, who wouldn’t debut until six years later – arrives to investigate the murder with a friend in tow, the psychiatrist Kai Bugge. The two of them have a longstanding bet: Bugge believes that he can solve a murder with his knowledge of Freudian psychology faster than Hammer can with his policeman’s bag of tricks, such as tracking down alibis or dusting for fingerprints. Bugge, incidentally, is based on a real person, Trygve Braatøy (1904-1953), a psychiatrist known primarily for introducing Sigmund Freud’s theories into Norwegian academia and for his study of Knut Hamsun’s fiction based on Freudian psychoanalysis. Bugge, we’re told, has a fashionable Oslo psychiatry practice treating hysterical middle-­aged women, but his true interest is in putting his theoretical knowledge to the test in the world of crime detection. The prime suspect in the case is Helge’s ex, a young woman named Sonja (when we meet her again in The Lake of the Dead, she’ll be married to Bernhard and raising two children). After a number of clues and red herrings, the real murderer is of course finally revealed, and unlike in The Lake of the Dead, no trace of the supernatural is to be found.

It’s an enjoyable book, what’s sometimes called a ‘cozy crime’ novel, since Hammer and Bugge’s constant presence in the house after the corpse is discovered fairly assures no further murders will take place, meaning there’s no particular sense of threat or unease, just a wait for the eventual unmasking. But although it can still be read with pleasure today, to a certain extent Nattmennesket reads like what it is – a first novel by a young man who has read a lot of Agatha Christie.

In the single year that elapses between this book and The Lake of the Dead, Bjerke advances light years as a novelist: his second effort is considerably more suspenseful and compulsively page-turning; if you didn’t know it had been written by a young man of 24, you would assume from its assured tone and masterful pacing that it was the work of a mature writer at the height of his powers. Published in 1942, again under the Borge pseudonym, Bjerke’s book became an instant hit and has rarely, if ever, been out of print in Norway. At its most basic level, it’s a book about a mysterious death and an attempt to find an explanation for it, whether suicide, murder, or something paranormal. But the book can also be read more broadly as dealing with a central conflict: modern-day science and rationalism versus age-old belief in the occult and supernatural.

This is not, of course, a new theme in literature; it wasn’t even new when Marie Corelli tackled the same issue in The Sorrows of Satan (1895) decades earlier. Corelli’s book is set in modern-day London, where a new creed of materialism has replaced a belief in God, making the city fertile ground for the Devil when he returns in the guise of a fashionable prince. Many of the arguments employed by Bjerke’s character Gabriel Mørk, a fervent believer in the occult and supernatural, echo ones to be found in Corelli’s novel half a century earlier. It’s surprising, then, to see a novel published as late as 1942 covering much of the same ground in the science vs. spiritualism debate that had raged decades before. After all, one would think that the airy and ethereal world of the supernatural would be the farthest thing from people’s minds in 1942, when there were considerably more down-to-earth problems to worry about. Norway was occupied by the Nazis and Norwegians were enduring rationing, shortages, and other daily hardships, while elsewhere in the world the war was being waged fiercely and real-life horrors were being perpetrated in concentration camps.

But the fact that Bjerke treats the supernatural as a serious topic of debate in 1942 is perhaps less surprising if we take into account a strange event that happened in Norway in the 1930s. Ludwig Dahl, a judge and mayor of Bergen, was a fervent believer in spiritualism and regularly conducted seances, believing it was a means of communicating with his two deceased sons, who had died tragically in accidents at young ages. During one seance in 1933, the medium claimed to have a message for Dahl from his son Ragnar, saying that Dahl would perish in August of the following year. When August 1934 came around, Dahl was visiting the seaside at the same spot where his son had drowned fifteen years earlier. An expert swimmer, Dahl ventured out into the water, where he was suddenly sucked down beneath the surface and drowned. The prophecy from the great beyond had been fulfilled. Or perhaps not: as it turned out, Dahl’s family was in desperate financial straits, and he had a lucrative life insurance policy that was set to expire the very next day. The daughter – and the medium – were charged with a plot to murder him for the insurance money; the court proceedings went on for three years and became an international sensation. Science was literally pitted against spiritualism in a court of law – Norwegians and the rest of the world were captivated. In the end, the verdict was acquittal, and Dahl’s death to this day is officially classified as an accident, but not all believers in the occult are convinced. Considering Bjerke mentions Dahl by name in the novel, and given the visual imagery of his being sucked down to his death in a body of water, it’s hard to imagine the case wasn’t in the author’s mind when formulating his book.

In The Lake of the Dead, the psychiatrist Bugge is the spokesman for the modern-day belief that there’s a rational explanation for everything, and that all things in the universe are governed by natural, scientific laws. His friend, the literary critic Mørk (whose surname appropriately means ‘dark’ in Norwegian), takes the opposite stance, believing that the twentieth century has been too quick to jettison belief in God and the Devil; in short, he subscribes to Hamlet’s view about there being ‘more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy’. Mørk’s mind is made up at the beginning of the novel: he’s convinced an occult phenomenon is at work. But Bugge, the sober-minded medical professional, can’t or won’t accept such a hypothesis and spends the rest of the novel trying to find an alternative explanation. The oft-cited principle of Occam’s razor teaches us that when faced with two possible solutions to a problem, we should accept the simplest. As you read the book, you’ll have to consider for yourself which man’s theories about the case are ultimately the most far-fetched.

In addition to this debate between the material and spiritual views of the world, the author’s daughter, Vilde Bjerke, has seen another dimension in the novel. She argues that the book includes symbolism that makes it a subtly anti-Nazi text. In her view, the lake, with its deadly attractive properties, represents the sinister allure of Nazi ideology, while the character of Liljan, the pure, lily-white young woman, represents Norway, which the male characters, a sort of group of resistance fighters, must try to save. Whether Bjerke intended such a reading or not, the fact that the book is open to additional layers of interpretation is further testament to how much more serious a literary effort his book is than most other crime novels of the period.

One other aspect of the novel bears mentioning here. A number of Norwegian readers, reviewing the book online, have commented that although it’s a first-rate thriller, their enjoyment of the story was hampered by what they see as its misogyny. This doesn’t seem an entirely accurate criticism. Misogyny, after all, is defined as a hatred of women (from the Greek miso-, hatred + gyne, woman), and I don’t think any fair reading of the book would conclude that it shows a hatred of women. Indeed, at one point in the novel Bjerke explicitly notes that one of the characters (the occultist Mørk) is a misogynist, thus implying that, in his view at least, the other characters – and himself – are not. However, there’s no denying that the book’s attitude towards women seems very dated in 2021. The novel has paternalistic and chauvinistic tendencies that some readers may find off­-putting. Women are described on a number of occasions as the ‘weaker sex’ and as fragile beings in need of the male characters’ protection, and Bernhard’s wife, Sonja, spends the greater part of the book in the background, her role limited to making coffee and food for the male characters and looking attractive in a bathing suit. Meanwhile, most of the real action in the novel is reserved to the men, who also spend a lot of time smoking and drinking while the women toil in the kitchen. For the most part, though, although the depiction of gender roles in the book feels dated, I’m not sure it’s actually all that offensive; in fact, at times it’s so over the top as to be almost unintentionally humorous. It should go without saying, but before we cast stones at Bjerke for his portrayal of gender roles, it bears remembering that the book was written eighty years ago, when men and women’s societal roles were often regarded much differently than today. It’s also worth noting in passing that Sonja is described by several of the male characters as ‘brave’, in explicit contrast to her cowardly husband, and towards the end of the book, while Bernhard is still flailing around in hopeless incomprehension of what is going on, ...