The Lost Village
The Lost Village by Camilla Sten is a new disturbing thriller. The Lost Village is a story about a remote village where everyone suddenly went missing.
Alice has been following the story of the village her whole life. Her grandmother was a direct descendent of the villagers who vanished in 1959. The only known survivor was a baby, who was anonymously adopted into the system. Hung on a pole, a woman had been stoned to death, and she was not found until weeks later. As an adult and a documentary filmmaker, Alice decides that this is the way she’ll break into the filmmaking scene. She gathers a group of people, including her ex-best friend and the only survivor’s granddaughter, and they arrive at the village.
“Seven years have passed since then, almost a quarter of my life. And all this time, she’s been like a half-healed wound, a scape I can never quite seem to stop myself from scratching.”
Things start to get strange and upsetting, and no one knows who to trust. Are they really seeing things, or are old wounds being brought up? Completely cut off from the rest of the world, it’s hard to tell what’s true or not. This book attempts to be a Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar trailer, and it does an excellent job of it.
I read this book as part of my ClearUrShit readathon. This was specifically for the Scary Book prompt in week two. If you guys followed along any with me, you’d have seen some of my updates about this on both youtube and Twitter!
Sten does a fantastic job of building you up in suspense in this book. It was a slow start, but this was to get all the groundwork going. As we learn about our characters and their histories, you start to question everyone’s motives for working on this project. You also learn more about the village, and the church, finding that this was a cult gone wrong. With all the groundwork in place, their sanity starts to slip. This process really makes you unsure what’s going on and who is at fault.
“We’re not alone here.”
The ending answered all my questions, which is all I ask for a lot of the time. It was wrapped up without being predictable. That’s a challenging task in a book like this, and I think Sten did terrifically. The slow intro is completely worth working through for the rest of the book. There was a moment of conflict between Max and Alice that, I personally, found utterly unnecessary. However, I can’t go into that further without spoiling the book. Maybe you’ll just have to read the book and let me know if you feel the same way!
Thank you to Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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