The Troll King: A Review

The Troll King, by Kolbeinn Karlsson, is one of Top Shelf's recently released "Swedish Invasion" books that I picked up at C2E2. Before getting into the substance of the book, I do want to mention/disclose that both Karlsson and Mats Jonsson, whose book Hey Princess I will be reviewing on this site soon, were two of the nicest, friendliest artists I met at the show. Its kind of amusing that Karlsson's back jacket picture makes him look kind of scary and intense, but in person, he is a big, soft-spoken teddy bear.

But enough about that -- none of it would matter if the books were no good. And while I enjoyed all three of the books, they each offered something a little different to recommend them to the audience. While both 120 Days of Simon and Hey Princess are grounded firmly in the real world, The Troll King offers a sumptuous flight of fantasy into a slightly off-kilter forest world, swimming in strangely compelling oddness. I don't know if it was the geographic connection or something more, but as I read The Troll King I could almost hear Swedish band The Knife's Silent Shout album playing in the background, beckoning me further into the deep woods and introducing me to the strange characters to be found there.

The scenes portrayed in The Troll King take place mostly in a surreal dreamworld far away from society, featuring all manner of creatures -- the hair-covered male couple whose story makes up the bulk of the book, their strangely conceived children, the carrot-man who strangely transforms into a massive tree and later reproduces, the dwarf floating down the river, the green men who also make the forest their home, and other, stranger delights. And if the dreamlike quality of the work does not end with the depictions of the forest and its creatures, but extend to the progression of events, which follows the type of pleasant yet somehow foreboding logic of the deepest and most affecting of dreams.

Yet despite the surreal nature of the book, rendered beautifully by Karlsson, there is a real emotional response conjured by the stories found within. Particularly compelling are the hairy men, self-described as "ewoks," who hide their appearance to go out into the world and buy groceries at IGA. Their affection for each other is genuinely touching, as is their struggles with raising their two children, including the painful process of dealing with adolescent rebellion and their offspring's eventual rejection of their forest home.

Karlsson accomplishes most of these effects without any words at all, letting the art speak for itself and tell the story in a way that allows the reader to import his or her own significance to the symbolic images laid out on the page. While I've only read The Troll King for the first time today, it seems likely to be a book that will reward multiple re-readings, opening up new interpretations and connections between the psychedelically-tinged images contained within.