But we had real differences, too, of course: My journalistic background and Börge’s journey through twenty-four years of drug addiction to KRIS and counseling juvenile offenders. We decided to find a way to use these similarities and differences, to create an authorship that adhered to the basic rule of half-and-half—half fiction and half facts, some things that have happened and some that could happen. And all of it brought to life through storytelling.
Writing a novel can be strange work—from your keyboard you are able to control a world, pointing and showing how things should look.
We have done that. We have used prisons and forests and roads that nobody has seen; we have moved the nursery schools around in Strängnäs and Enköping and used rooms in the Stockholm police station that were never built.
But there are some things we wish we had imagined, that we wish were just our exaggerations created in order to tell a good story.
The destructive man who destroys himself is real. Bernt Lund, who licks feet and puts metal objects into the vaginas of young girls, who lacks the ability to identify emotionally with other human beings, is real. Tinyboy, who was molested as a child and then stuck ice picks into everything that reminded him of that fact, is real. Fredrik and Agnes Steffansson, who lost everything they had and had to try to find a new way to keep living, are real. Lennart Oscarsson, who despises the pedophiles who are his livelihood, is real. Hilding Oldéus, who can’t stand to feel anymore, who turns himself off with heroin, who is afraid, who serves his time in prison by seeking out someone else for protection to feel less afraid if only for a moment, is real. Flasher-Göran, who made a mistake and was given a life sentence by his neighbors, is real. Bengt Söderlund, who has beautiful children in a beautiful garden and thinks that if the law won’t protect them, he will, is real. They are all somewhere among us, too absurd to be made up.
The original Swedish title, The Beast, refers to the sick person who rapes and destroys small children. But later, perhaps, the beast is the man who decides that he has the right to choose who will die and who will live, who in his sorrow becomes judge, jury, and executioner—and perhaps it’s he, the beast, who prevents more people from dying. Or maybe, maybe the beast is all the people of the community who come together through their hatred of sexual offenders, who protest outside the courtroom or who take the law in their own hands on the basis of convictions—perhaps it’s precisely those people who have become the beast during the course of the story. In the end, it is for the reader to decide.
Pen 33 eventually had a fantastic ride—it was awarded the Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel, translated into thirty languages, published in seventy-five countries, filmed, read for excitement and entertainment, and occasionally served as the basis for debate and discussion. And beginning with this book, we decided to donate 10 percent of the profits to organizations working on issues related to the plot of each book, making it a debut in more ways than one. For Pen 33 we donated to Save the Children, an outstanding organization that combats child pornography in Sweden and internationally.
Börge lost a battle with cancer in 2017, but I know he would be as pleased as I am that the journey we began all those years ago has led to this moment, with the book available at long last to American readers.
Anders Roslund
October 9, 2017
Stockholm, Sweden
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