I share a few thoughts on Troll: A Love Story by the Finnish science fiction and fantasy writer, Johanna Sinisalo

“Its juniper-berry smell plays in my nostrils. Its own species didn’t want it. It was too much ballast, a burden. They abandoned this light, slender, supple being, worthy of being immortalized in black marble.”

A Finnish troll it may be, but not of the familiarly endearing Tovian variety – since the beast we encounter in Johanna Sinisalo’s gay fantasy, Troll: A Love Story is wild-eyed, nauseatingly carnivorous and exudes pungent sex pheromones from its every pore.

When, after an overly boozy, romantically unsuccessful evening, Angel, a talented young photographer living in Tampere, stumbles across a group of teenagers taunting a small, helpless creature lying in the snow, he becomes enraged and drives them away. On closer inspection, he sees in the shadows, “curled up in a strange position,” the head and black mane of “the most beautiful thing [he’s] ever seen.” Believing it to be abandoned, he takes pity on this likely injured, extremely rare troll cub and, without further ado, carries it back to his apartment. Here he places it on his bed, gently covers it with a blanket and begins the long and problematic process of nursing it back to health. What he cannot know, however, is that he is about to unleash chaos into his previously comfortable if frustratingly mundane life.

An unsettling, cleverly constructed story, filled with eroticism and dark humour, Troll is an urban fantasy in a world similar to (but not) our own, which Ellen Emery Heltzel (USA Today) memorably described as “a punk version of The Hobbit.” The novel is constructed from intense inner narratives by each of the main human characters (but never the troll), intermingled with invented texts from fictional newspaper articles, academic journals and folk tales, enabling the reader to understand the importance of trolls in Finnish history and culture.

The author (born in Sodankylä in 1958), is well known to Finnish science fiction and fantasy aficionados, having had enormous success there with her writing in the late ‘80s and early ’90s. According to her entry in the SFE, Johanna Sinisalo “studied literature and drama at the University of Tampere, then worked in advertising while writing short stories,” before becoming a full-time writer in 1997. Troll – her debut novel – “won the Finlandia Prize for best Finnish novel, Finland’s highest annual literary Award; and in translation the James Tiptree Jr Award in 2004.”

In an interview with Jonathan Thornton, Sinisalo described her book as being “profoundly Finnish” (The Fantasy Hive, 2021) and when asked by Adam Mills (Weird Fiction Review, 2012) what “weird and strange literature” she encountered as a child, she had no hesitation in telling him that among the “most influential” was “Tove Jansson’s Moomin [series], especially Comet in Moominland,” which she portrayed as “a combination of a sci-fi thriller and a quite weird fairy tale that immediately hooked [her] on Jansson’s books.” Well, how could it be otherwise?

As to my overall opinion of the novel, I found it a poignantly eccentric tale, melancholy in a characteristically Nordic manner, never seemingly less than rational, heartrendingly sad at times, mildly but necessarily crude in places, occasionally nasty, though, more frequently compassionate and amusing. And as I discovered, it is the ideal novel to read over a snowy weekend in January.

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First published in Finland as Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (2000), and in the UK as Not Before Sundown (2003), my softback edition of the novel, titled Troll: A Love Story, was published by Pushkin Press in 2024 and translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas (1924-2011). Its striking cover was designed by Jo Walker. I purchased my copy from Blackwell’s in January 2025.

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“It looks at me like a puppy-dog, but there are live coals in its orange eyes. It’s lying curled up into a ball… I sit [beside it on the bed] and observe its slender, heaving black sides… Suddenly its paw straightens out… and its long supple fingers wrap around my wrist for a moment… and my eyes fill with tears.”

Categories: Fantasy Fiction, LGB, Translated Literature

Tags: Fantasy Fiction, Finland, Finnish Authors, Finnish Literature, Finnish Novels, Folktales, Gay Fiction, Johanna Sinisalo, LGB Fiction, Moomins, Nordic Literature, Tove Jansson, Urban Fantasy