Ignis fatuus

Petra Klabouchová

Petra Klabouchová: Ignis fatuus

Original title: Ignis fatuus


Genre: horror novel


Publisher:

Host, 2024


ISBN: 978-80-275-2045-9


Pages: 335


Rights sold to:

Serbia (Ammonite Books)

Summary


Horror story set in the magical Bohemian Forest, where life and death are on intimate terms

 

It is the late 1970s. In a restricted area along the River Křemelná in the Bohemian Forest, an ancient legend comes back to life. With increasing frequency, border guards are reporting sightings of a strange luminous phenomenon. Suspicion is growing that the West is hatching a hostile plan, of which the phenomenon is a part. Meanwhile, ages-old tales of will-o’-the-wisps and bodiless entities are doing the rounds. To investigate the sightings, a scientific expedition is sent to places where access has been restricted for decades. The scientists are confident of finding a reasonable explanation, but others fear that they will lose their minds in the mysterious wetlands. Is it all the work of fatigue and nature, or is some ancient force truly playing cat and mouse? In a locality that never forgets, every soul carries its personal and ancestral past. This time, the Bohemian Forest is out for revenge.       

Petra Klabouchová about her book:

"After By the North Wall, I wanted to play a little more with fantasy and test the power of words, as well as to find out if my writing could scare the reader and ages-old mysteries that terrified generations of our ancestors could scare us. For years I collected mystery stories from my native Bohemian Forest, so giving rise to this horror mystery that wishes to be something more than a fairy tale for adults."    


Reviews

"The author vividly builds up the atmosphere, with her knowledge of the local realia, the distinctive local inhabitants and human dispositions in general. Moreover, she manages to create believable characters with whom you can sympathize, along with their fear of the events that are going to disrupt their hitherto strictly precise view of the world. (…)

Klabouchová deftly balances on the brittle borderline between the real and the mysterious. (...)

The novel subliminally tells the story of an ancient landscape destroyed by crude human treatment. (…) Every sin of the past is to be avenged. This motif is shared with the previous book, By the North Wall / U severní zdi. In Ignis Fatuus, the past again increasingly bursts forth into the present, reminding us that our sins will not be forgotten. They’re just going to sleep quietly until someone or something comes along to do the reckoning for us. This is perhaps the strongest message of the book, which elevates this “leisure reading” to much higher realms.

(...) The book is for the most part engrossing and unforgettable."

Irena Hejdová, Deník N

 

"The story, based on local superstitions and interspersed with excerpts from official writings describing specific anomalies and paranormal phenomena, is well constructed, building up and sustaining the tension from beginning to end. (...)

And just when you feel that you are emotionally exhausted and that nothing can surprise you anymore, an unexpected plot twist radically affects your view of the previous pages. The detailed description of the Bohemian Forest landscape, the interconnection of the story and the historical realities of the borderlands and the context of the time – the story takes place under communism – creating a solid basis for a juicy, mysterious text that makes you look over your shoulder when you go for a walk in the forest at twilight. What if you encounter ball lightning, will-o’-the-wisps or some other disembodied beings?"

Minka Dočkalová, Full Moon

 

"Klabouchová bases her story on a welter of historical facts, but at the same time she takes it over and beyond the expected. And when she finally offers an explanation that enables the readers to make sense of this fairy whirl – in which reality dances with the spectral, as  soldiers once did with the corpses at the Chapel of the Holy Cross – she immediately deprives them of that certainty as well. (…)

In itself this book remains a horror story, but if it transcends this genre without actually abandoning it, this is due to its masterly work with language.

Klabouchová is strong in her descriptions of the environment and the inner states of her antiheroes. Adjectives that a more insecure novelist might use as mere background colouring take her at her word and become the primary vehicle of meaning."

Aleš Palán, Aktuálně

 

"Writing good genre literature is no easier than writing the “highbrow” kind. Instead of freewheeling, one has to come to terms with genre conventions and find one’s own way through territory that hundreds of predecessors have traversed. In Ignis fatuus, Petra Klabouchová offers the kind of original Czech literary horror story that we haven’t seen for a long time.

(...) Klabouchová provides an excellent depiction of the distinctive nature of the Bohemian Forest weather and landscape, and she has the ability to create interesting characters. (...)

The horror starts up after just the first fifth of the book when the expedition takes a completely different direction, and the reader hesitates: Is this too soon? This cannot be sustained to the end! But Klabouchová manages to thicken the plot, which may sound like one of the weaker X-Files stories when retold. The genius loci gradually merges with the demons of the family and working relationships that the scientists carry with them in the horror plot. But most importantly, the horrors of the past are not laid to rest here once and for all. They live on or are only now awakening. The rituals of the Celtic druids merge with the murder and violence of the next millennia, and everything escalates with the expulsion of the Germans and the manhunts for those attempting to leave the communist paradise to which the panicky soldiers have been led. A place of memory that is a place of terror comes alive. And with the addition of more and more dimensions, this paranormal space in the Bohemian Forest also becomes a powerful metaphor: a past filled with horrors cannot just be put in a display window.

Klabouchová judiciously inserts local legends into the narrative, which she manages to tie together into a whole that holds together while remaining dense and multi-layered. To this she adds a few unexpected twists. As a result, the horror action keeps up the suspense throughout the remaining two hundred and fifty pages. Moreover, the inventive ending does not suggest that an attempt has been made to just bring the story to an end any old how. Ignis fatuus thus turns into quite a significant part of the Bohemian Forest literary myth; perhaps even more significant than the attempts at novel elaborations of the Bohemian Forest King myth. And it is proof that even horror can be written so sophisticatedly and so well that the reader does not know whether to hurry to the dénouement or savour every page."

Petr A. Bílek, Respekt

 

"Ignis fatuus proves that even Czech horror is worth following.

(…) The novel is at its most compelling and terrifying in the passages that deal with seemingly everyday life in a region where the boundary between the different governmental systems is clearly demarcated by barbed wire, but the one between the world of the living and the dead dissolves into the ever-present mist. In the descriptions of decaying farmhouses and dead orchards, ancient wrongs hover inexorably, and even a banal sensation like the smell of cinnamon and freshly baked strudel has connotations of horror here.

(…) In her purely local horror, Klabouchová works pragmatically with globally comprehensible forms of the genre, but she also manages to benefit from the influences left in the Central European space by writers such as Jozef Karika.

(…) The ability to illuminate the Czech periphery as a place of unease, shifting identities and unprocessed traumas (...) makes Petra Klabouchová a figure that has long been missing from the all-too-fractured tradition of Czech horror."

Jarmila Křenková, Seznam Zprávy

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