Talking Location With Alex Dahl – OSLO and TELEMARK

9th July 2021

TalkingLocationWith…. Alex Dahl, author of Cabin Fever, psychological thriller set in Oslo and Telemark, NORWAY.

Towards the end of 2019, I started planning my new thriller, Cabin Fever, which tells the story of experienced psychotherapist, Dr. Kristina Moss, who finds herself alone and injured in a remote cabin belonging to her client, enigmatic novelist Leah, who has recently gone missing.

Location scouting and geographical research is a big part of the process for me, and one of the things I enjoy most in the early stages of novel writing. I decided to set Cabin Fever in Norway with dual locations between central Oslo and the wilderness of Telemark, a few hours from the capital. As with my previous novel, Playdate, which is set in the French Pyrenees, the inspiration for Cabin Fever’s location came through a plane window. I was on my way back from London, on approach into Sandefjord Torp, flying low over dense forests and ice-crusted black lakes. The land below me was snow-struck and remote, there were no signs of human activity besides a few empty forest tracks. It was perfect. I shivered as I imagined myself down there, alone, and in that moment one of the central images I built Cabin Fever from, came to me; a lone woman, seriously injured, crawling up a steep track in a snowstorm, vivid blood streaking the snow beneath her.

At the time, of course, I had no idea that the world as we knew it was about to grind to a standstill. As Covid-19 shut down societies worldwide and put a swift end to my way of life as I knew it, I escaped into Cabin Fever. I yearned intensely to travel; my life in the past decade had included almost weekly flying and I’d long gotten used to dividing my tijme between two countries.

The reality of being stuck in one place and the first lockdown contributed to a mounting sense of claustrophobia that I wanted to infuse into the novel. I deliberately used the feeling of dread as our collective lives fell apart to create Kristina Moss, the therapist trapped in a remote mountain cabin, and whose own life comes entirely undone.

An interesting contrast between the affluent and mildly cosmopolitan part of Oslo where I grew up and the wild, remote forests that make up much of Norway emerged as I wrote Cabin Fever. I wanted these contrasts reflected in my characters, in controlled, groomed Oslo-girl Kristina and in wild, passionate Leah. But as Kristina finds herself in those ungoverned woods, alone, the control she has worked so hard at, slips. After all, we can’t hide from ourselves, nor remove ourselves from the wildness within. It’s there. Waiting.

When I was younger and growing up in Norway, I was blind to the majestic nature central to Norwegian life and craved the buzz and excitement of big cities. Oslo just couldn’t deliver the sophistication and excitement I was after; I wanted Paris, London, San Francisco, Moscow, and so I went away, to all of those places and many more, both to live and to visit. Then, as my career as a writer began to grow, I found myself returning to those Scandinavian influences that, as it turns out, lend themselves particularly well to crime fiction and psychological thrillers. By placing characters in locations dominated by broody, vast, powerful landscapes we force them to come face to face with their own insignificance and how, at the end of the day, they are totally at the mercy of nature. And let’s face it, even though cities might give us a false sense of security merely from being surrounded by other people, it feels much scarier to be by ourselves somewhere remote with only ourselves for company.

During the Spring and Summer of 2020, I drove around Telemark on endless research trips. I trekked up steep slopes to almost inaccessible cabins. I sat, alone, by the shores of deep, dark lakes. I slept by myself in a huge, abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. I won’t lie- I was terrified. I reconnected with Frogner, the part of Oslo where I grew up and where Kristina Moss lives, and greatly enjoyed infusing the novel with places that are intrinsically familiar to myself. It was a new and interesting experience to set a book so close to home on many levels. I did miss the more exotic location scouting I usually indulge in with my novels but Cabin Fever also brought a new appreciation for the place I spent my early years, and a new understanding for the need to connect with wild nature, which is very important to most Norwegians and had eluded me for so many years. Big cities are wonderful, but if you really want to freak yourself out, try the Norwegian forests. By yourself.

Alex Dahl

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