One year is not very long. And one year is enough.
Stormen Bibliotek, Bodø, Norway, 2026
First Words
About a year ago, in a small house on a small island in Northern Norway, I decided I would finish a book. Not write one. Many people write things and never finish them. The decision was about finishing: sending the thing out and letting it become what it was going to become without my permission.
I came to fiction late, and from elsewhere. Before this there was poetry, and there was music, dark ambient under two names that few people will ever hear. I wrote lyrics for years before I wrote prose, and those lyrics taught me something I did not realise I had learned until I started Krelløy. They taught me about repetition, about the way a phrase that returns is heavier than it was the first time. Much of the atmosphere in Krelløy was built that way, with small images and cadences that come back changed.
Before the music there was archaeology: a thesis on fantastic animals in ancient Greek funerary art, and long hours reading about what people put into graves and why. Before that, the forests around Handlová.
Writing had been there the whole time. I had not yet given it the weight of a decision. Krelløy was that decision. Some of it was also written for Linnet. That is its own story, and not one for this post.
Krelløy, Sør-Arnøy, Norway, 2026
What came
The book came out in September. The first time I spoke about it in public was at Pellerie, here on Sør-Arnøy, in a small room with people I see at the shop and on the road. That was when it became a real thing outside my own head.
What happened after came slowly. Copies travelled. Readers I will never meet wrote to me about scenes that had stayed with them. Libraries took it onto their shelves. A reviewer in the UK read it carefully and wrote about it carefully, which is a kindness. People I have never spoken to began recommending the book to other people I have never spoken to.
It also divided readers, and I am glad of that. Some found what I had hoped they would find. Others did not, and said exactly why, and some of what they said was right. A first novel has weaknesses. Mine has its share. I would rather hear the real criticism than empty reassurance, and I am taking those notes into the next book.
After a first novel goes out, you expect noise, or silence, or some kind of verdict. What comes is more ordinary than that. The book is its own thing now, in other people’s hands, and the job has moved from making it to letting it be.
By now more than five hundred physical copies are somewhere in the world. There was a guest essay at Ginger Nuts of Horror, and a review in progress there. There are library copies in Gildeskål, Bodø and Mo i Rana, and one held in the national collection. None of it happened the way I expected, and most of it happened while I sat at the same desk, working on the next book.
Krelløy at Stormen Bibliotek, Bodø, Norway, 2026
Stormen
In Bodø, on the mainland north of where I live, there is a library called Stormen, which means the storm. I was invited there one afternoon to talk about Krelløy and about what comes next.
I am a quiet person, and standing in front of other people does not come naturally to me. Writing is the medium I trust, partly because it gives me time to think and partly because the rest of me has always been slower than my sentences. So this was a different kind of afternoon for me, and I was more nervous than I had expected.
The room was warm, and people came whom I had not expected. One of them was Emmanuel, from Argentina. He came dressed in black, there for both the book and the music. We talked about dark ambient, about Burzum, and about the kind of work that lives in a particular corner of a record collection or a bookshelf, the corner not everyone reaches for. Emmanuel, if you read this: greetings.
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That conversation mattered to me. It was short, but it was the first time at one of these events that I felt readers with tastes like mine were beginning to find me, and I them.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon I told them, for the first time out loud, about the second book.
The Shape
Over this year I have come to understand what I am writing. I am drawn to large landscapes that do not notice us, to islands and forests where the ground is older than any story we can tell on top of it, and to the night sky. I am drawn to people pressed against what they cannot quite name, coming apart slowly rather than all at once, and to horror that arrives by implication.
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The second book asks something harder of me. Krelløy leaned on repetition and atmosphere, on phrases that come back changed and on long silences in the landscape. The new novel is built on research. The horror has to be credible, and for that everything around it has to be known: the trees, the stars, the village, and what a person living the life I am writing about actually does at four in the morning. I do not want to gesture at credibility. I want to earn it.
The other change is trust. I say less, leave more out, and do not over-explain the parts I do leave in. That is the part of the craft I am working on hardest right now.
I think I have found the audience I want to write for. Not the largest possible audience. The right one.
Michal Polgár reading a book in the darkness, Handlová, 2017
Ahead
There will be more books. That is the simplest way to say it.
I am writing the second one now. It is set somewhere I knew before I knew Norway, and it asks different questions from Krelløy. The voice is more restrained, and the dread arrives differently. I think it is a better book, and I will probably think the same about the one after it. That is, I hope, how this is supposed to work.
I also want the books to be made well as objects. Proper design, the whole sequence treated as one series and not a row of books that happen to share an author. If someone takes one of them off a shelf in five or ten years, I want them to feel the care in the object as well as in the writing.
An announcement will come soon. Not yet, but soon.
For now, only this: one year in, the decision was the right one. I am where I am supposed to be, doing the thing I am supposed to be doing, and this is a quieter sentence than it sounds.
Notes for the second book, Sør-Arnøy, Norway, 2025
Thank you for reading along through the first year.
