Viktor Grahn

Grahn believes you have to love a character before you can fear for them. His books take their time — two, three chapters in which a biologist has her first coffee in a Black Forest ranger's lodge and notices the scent of resin through the open window, in which a doctor in 1923 travels by train to a village in the Carpathians and sees the wooded ridges rise out of the fog for the first time, in which a family arrives at a Baltic moor and thinks: here we can start over. These chapters are not the calm before the storm. They're the reason the storm hurts. Grahn writes about intelligent, tenacious people who want to get their lives under control. Only when the reader is sitting with them at the table does he pull the ground away.

Then it tips — and the place becomes the problem. Grahn's landscapes are not scenery in front of which something bad happens. The landscape IS the bad thing. An Alpine valley that blocks the escape. Fog that rises from the ground instead of falling from the sky. A forest that swallows paths that were there yesterday. His villages work similarly: closed systems of friendliness and silence, where the neighbour smiles and the innkeeper knows your name even though you never gave it. What interests Grahn is not the monster behind the door — it's the moment when the explanations stop working. When a rational person notices that the calendar on the wall shows the wrong month and understands that nobody thinks it's a mistake.

Grahn grew up in the Lötschental, in Valais, in a valley reachable only by a pass or a tunnel. The houses stood too close together. The people spoke too little. His grandfather was an Älpler, and the only thing he ever said about the mountains was: You don't go up to the Alp at night. You don't go alone. And you don't go when it gets quiet. He never explained what he meant by quiet.

After his Matura, Bern, then Vienna — German Studies and European Ethnology, the science of what communities do when no one is watching. Field reports on alpine rituals, on carnival customs predating Christianity, on villages that don't name certain nights. Then journalism. In a village in Valais, a woman told him the fountain in the village centre hadn't been used for four generations. Not because the water was bad. Nobody could tell him why. But nobody drank from it. On the third day, he noticed that the windows of the houses around the fountain had no curtains. Not because the residents had removed them. The frames were bricked up.

He lives in Thun, in a flat with a view of the lake. He writes at night. On his desk lies a piece of rock from a gallery in the Lötschental. It's cold. It stays cold, even when the heating is on.

I consider horror the most honest genre there is. Every other narrative form is allowed to pretend the world is fundamentally comprehensible — that there's an explanation for everything, an order, a reason. Horror says: no. Some things resist understanding. And the question that drives me is not what lurks in the dark. It's the question of why we're so certain that nothing lurks in the dark. Where does that confidence come from? And what happens when it breaks?

What fascinates me about people is their stubbornness. How long someone clings to an explanation even though the facts say otherwise. How an intelligent person stands before an impossible phenomenon and says: there must be a reason, I just haven't found it yet. This crumbling of rationalisation — sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter — that's the core of my books. Not the scream at the end. The half hour before it, when someone is trying not to scream. That's not sadism. That's respect for the character. Because the refusal to accept the impossible is the most human thing I know.

I write about European places because I grew up here and because this continent is old in a way that's underestimated. Beneath every village lies an older village. Beneath every tradition lies an older tradition. The Alps, the Black Forest, the Carpathians, the Baltic moors — these are not picturesque backdrops. These are landscapes that have been settled for millennia and where generations of people have learned to stay silent about certain things. That silence interests me more than any monster. An entire village that knows why you don't drink from the fountain but doesn't say it — that, for me, is horror. Not what's in the fountain. But the fact that everyone knows and nobody speaks.

Whoever reads my books gets no answers. But they get the moment when the right question stands in the room for the first time — and everyone in the room pretends they didn't hear it. Writing that moment so the reader feels it in their stomach: that's what I get up at night for.