The fame and profits of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not letting Scandinavian authors rest, and a male duo writing under the pseudonym Erik Axl Sund produced a 3,000-page trilogy they clearly hope will get as many sales. The Crow Girl is the first ridiculously bad novel in the series.
These two male writers clearly revel in imagery of female degradation and spin out one scene of rape, torture and abuse of women and girls after another for 750 excruciating pages. I’m a huge fan of Law & Order: SVU, so I’m not squeamish. But these writers derive such obvious pleasure from describing victimization of girls and women that I can’t imagine any psychologically healthy person not being repelled by the book.
Aside from this, the only curious thing about the novel is the depiction of Sweden. In this book, Sweden is a country with a non-existent welfare state, great poverty, extreme sexism, crowds of unaccounted for immigrants wandering all over the place, and sky-high crime rates. It looks like the authors’ two favorite hobbies are fantasizing about child rape and feeling sorry for themselves.
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