In Vera Buck's work, parallel fictions and parental violence

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It was last fall. Vera Buck was still unknown in France, but in no time, with Wolf Children , she would become one of the favorites of the literary season. The German novelist played with the rules of the gothic detective novel and the atmospheric thriller, mixing past and present, the savagery of predators, lost innocence, and the secrets of a nature that has nothing appealing about it. But while shaking readers with a succession of mysteries, she glued them to this oppressive novel full of lies.

A year later, Vera Buck returns with The Treehouse , still juggling the fundamentals of the psychological and horror novel. We follow a family, Henrik, Nora and their 5-year-old boy, Fynn. All three go on vacation to an isolated house, inherited from Henrik's grandfather, who is obviously a strange guy with a complicated past. But the perfect stay in the Swedish countryside quickly takes another turn and the fairy tale turns into a nightmare when Fynn disappears. A few kilometers from the old farm, a young botanist, Rosa, "who has always loved the company of corpses" has just unearthed the skeleton of a child, leading to sinister revelations. But the essential is still elsewhere, at the top of a "treehouse" straight out of Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel , revealing traces of violence on old, threadbare blankets. This witch's nest is, among others, that of Marla, victim of a monster who keeps her locked up, most of the time tied up for years.

Vera Buck mercilessly develops all these parallel fictions by giving voice to her heroes—and especially her heroines—chapter after chapter. This method has been known since the dawn of time, but it is important in this book, which deals with parental violence, lost children, and victims of neglect. Clearly, the novelist delights in portraying the worst kind of bastards, and there are many of them.

Everything will end in trials, prison, and above all, explanations that simplify Vera Buck's argument, shoehorning everything into a disappointing final chapter. It's a shame, because human justice, confessions, and apologies will never save the girls from "the forest so dense and the sky so dark," as the remarkable Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstocking, writes, and whom Vera Buck cites in the epigraph.