I recently read The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag and was very interested in more of his work, so when I found out about Things From the Flood, I was very excited to read it. I first discovered Stålenhag as the author of the book that was the basis for the Prime Video TV series Tales From the Loop (which I loved watching); Things From the Flood is its sequel. Simon Stålenhag’s work is unique in that he combines text/prose and painted images to describe an alternate reality where technology advanced quicker than it did in our reality. However, his stories take place after advanced technology, including robotics, strange machines, wormholes, electromagnetic manipulation, genetic mutation, virtual reality and neural interfacing, have all become mundane and even derelict. Characters are ordinary, regular folks who are living and coping with what are essentially elements out of science fiction that are literally in their own backyards. 

Tales From the Loop involved a company that had a facility where workers were experimenting with these kinds of technology and affecting the surrounding towns. Things From the Flood occurs in the alternate 1990s, after the Loop was decommissioned, and water from that facility flooded the surrounding area and homes. While it sounds like a disaster story, that’s not the story at all. The focus is mostly on a young boy who is displaced, along with his mother and her boyfriend, when their home is flooded. They move into temporary residence at a designated high rise while their home is restored and decontaminated. What Stålenhag gives us is a series of vignettes of this boy as he hangs out in his neighbourhood, encounters other locals, and observes the bizarre things that share the area. It’s very much a tale of suburban idleness, with kid-things like schoolyard hazing, first kisses, and afternoon wandering, set against a very unique backdrop. It’s like Stranger Things, but much more mellow (yet perhaps a bit stranger and creepier, if you can believe it).

Unfortunately for me, I was unable to get ahold of the physical book (it’s a coffee-table style book, so it’s not cheap) nor the ebook, so I was only able to borrow the audiobook from the library (via Libby app). In my review of The Electric State, I mentioned how I couldn’t imagine  someone only using audio would be able to get immersed in that book because so much of the experience was from Stålenhag’s amazing visuals. This time I had to eat my words a bit, but thankfully the artist/author does include the majority of his images for free on his website. So, I was able to view most of them while listening to the book, but it wasn’t quite the same. The images are pretty incredible, especially a series of portraits of robots who have gone off to the wild. They adopt various “styles” of clothing and wear makeup left behind by humans, and even seem to develop some tribal, shamanistic characteristics, and yet they don’t really seem like people, either. (This impression is mostly from reading into the images as the actual prose is light on the details.)

Overall, I found the stories of this book less compelling than The Electric State. (I didn’t actually read Tales From the Loop, so I cannot compare.) The overall narrative (if it could be counted as one) was very loose and modest. Mood (especially 90s Nordic nostalgia) was more in the foreground than plot. Also, as characters and scenarios were introduced in each vignette, we move onto the next vignette often before the current one is fully explored. I really wanted to know more about another local boy who was feeding cats to a bunch of pet “dragons” that he found living near his home. I guess that’s why both books have spawned their own role-playing games: for people to immerse themselves in this reality, without being bound by a particular quest or story arc from the book.

Though I was less excited by this volume, I am nevertheless, very much engaged by Stålenhag’s imagination and cozy/creepy/crazy reality (even the prologue has the author commenting as if these were his own 90s memories and he lives in this alternate universe). Though these books are not easy to comeby, I would love to find more of Stålenhag’s works and continue day-tripping into this reality. 

4 stars

Check me out on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/78985113-alvin-ng