This story perplexed me at first for its entangled cast of characters and how they are placed and move about on the page. Entanglement is also enacted by way of the three intersecting towns of Vårnamo, Borås, and Jönköping; the lives of girls who frequent the Underryd Dance Hall and the Meat (boys) who are lured for sacrifice to the Black Goat; the tentacles and multiple eyes of the Black Goat monster and the entanglement of time because of the centuries that some of the girls of Borås have lived. There is almost no central character in this story because the characters exist as a community on the fringes of reality and as a ritual/sacrificial collective. The place and its history, its hunger, exist to feed the beast(s). Cosmic and earthly entanglements, and collision make this story wonderfully compelling.
Collected in Swedish Cults, Valancourt Books 2022
A Personal Anthology 