Hamløber (Skinrunner)

Hamløber has a compelling concept but is much too long and repetitious for what it ultimately wants to say. Rosengaard has several strong central ideas—online identity as shape-shifting, paranoia produced from a mixture of authentic harassment and algorithmic reinforcement, the internet as a homeland rather than a technology, and love becoming indistinguishable from shared delusion—but the novel explains each of them repeatedly. By the time Joshua compares the internet to a rip current, the reader has already watched Tasha drown in precisely that metaphorical current for hundreds of pages. By the time Laura concludes that the internet formed all of them, virtually every major character has already delivered some variation on that thesis.

The constant reproduction of memes, forum comments, emojis, gaming references, usernames and internet slang is initially very effective because it gives the novel a recognisable digital texture. Eventually it becomes exhausting. Pages of fake posts often perform the same narrative function: somebody says something grotesque, someone else responds ironically, Laura is simultaneously disgusted and fascinated, and then the feed moves on. The technique intentionally imitates doomscrolling, but reproducing the experience of doomscrolling is not always the same thing as making compelling fiction. There are long sections—particularly Tasha’s backstory with Conrad and Joshua’s equally extensive account of falling in love with Tasha—that could be dramatically compressed without sacrificing psychological depth.

The Conrad plot is especially overdeveloped. Tasha’s age-regression relationship with him is disturbing and psychologically interesting because it complicates simple categories of victim and perpetrator. She actively desires the relationship, Conrad appears to fulfil a genuine emotional need, and years later she can simultaneously say she was not forced and feel that he exploited her vulnerability. That moral ambiguity is one of the novel’s strongest elements. But it consumes so much narrative space that Conrad begins to look like the novel’s central mystery, only for the ending deliberately to refuse any definitive answer about whether he contributed to the later harassment. The ambiguity is thematically appropriate, but the sheer length of the setup makes the absence of resolution feel less provocative than anticlimactic.