Will Dean, author. Photo / Supplied
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 1000 kilometres 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 a horrifying crime from years before. It's an atmospheric, chilling tale with a fascinating heroine, though one that Dean himself thought may make it a hard-sell to publishers, as he was "an English dude in a forest in Sweden writing a deaf woman and the books are a bit like Twin Peaks".
But unlike Dean's previous efforts, which struggled to gain traction with literary agents, Dark Pines got plenty of agent interest and was snapped up for publication very quickly by a small literary publisher, who took a chance. It paid off, with that book, then series (Red Snow and Black River have followed, with a fourth out later this year), connecting with a fast-growing readership garnering critical acclaim and awards listings. It is now in development for a television series.
While the Tuva series was taking hold the past few years, Dean was also working on what he called his "secret project" – the manuscript that became The Last Thing to Burn. The idea came one midnight in the forest and kept him awake until morning. "The reason why it hit me, I think, was partly that the idea is so simple," he says. "It's two characters in a dilapidated farm on the Fens. So, it's really claustrophobic and intimate, almost more like a play than a movie."
Describing himself as a writer who's more "interested in the feels", in how something affects him on a human, emotional level rather than the intricacy of plotlines, Dean says the image that came to him of a woman on a farm in a very open landscape with no physical boundaries, a woman who "wanted to leave but could not, for myriad reasons", really impacted him.
His new standalone takes the creepiness and tension threaded through the Tuva books, and amplifies it to near-excruciating levels. "We're in a tiny dilapidated, cold cottage on the Fens, with a back bathroom the villain built himself which has a soft, damp floor like linoleum laid on to mud," says Dean. "A lot of early readers said they feel like they're in this cottage where everything takes place. I just like the intensity of it. My favourite book in the world is The Road by Cormac McCarthy - two characters: father and son. I love the fact you get to know those characters so deeply. And that's what I try to do with The Last Thing to Burn. I want it to be all about these characters and particularly the characters in that landscape."
The Last Thing to Burn (Hodder, $34.99) is out now.
'We really did fall in love. I didn’t know it could happen again,' said Jo Cartwright, 96.