Elin Lindström

Ekestad is a small town of roughly two thousand people in a county with a declining population and no particular distinction. It has no notable history, no famous sons or daughters, no industry that has failed or succeeded spectacularly. It is simply there, as it has been for three hundred years, beside its lake, in the middle of the country. Nothing bad ever happens here. There is a reason for that. *The Quiet Season* is slow burn horror about a small Swedish town where nothing ever happens—because something beneath the lake has made a deal that the residents don't fully understand until their children come of age. It follows Lena, a journalist who returns home after fifteen years to care for her dying father, as she discovers what the town's serenity actually costs. The novel unfolds across three acts: The Return (the drive in, the neighbours, the family she chose to leave, the brother who chose to stay); The Investigation (the records from 1952, the statistical impossibility of a town with no crime, what the lake does at dusk, what her father knows); and The Leaving (when someone dies, when the offer is made, the last time at the water, what it costs to leave, what it costs to stay). Lena is not a hero. She is a journalist who approaches the town's strangeness the way she approaches everything: by noting anomalies, by filing observations, by trying to maintain professional distance from feelings she doesn't want to examine. She has spent fifteen years not thinking about Ekestad. Now she has to think about it. Now she has to decide what to do with what she learns. The town's serenity is not natural. The road surfaces are smoother, the shoulders cleaner, the white lines freshly painted. The church has a newly painted gate, the filling station's forecourt is swept clean, the houses have woodpiles stacked to uniform height. The statistical impossibility is real—a town of two thousand people with no recorded crime, no accidents, no tragedy. The kind of record that onl