Down Where Monsters Dwell

Down Where Monsters Dwell is a folkloric Icelandic horror-fable about Halla, a widowed farm mistress who takes in an abandoned baby believed to be a changeling, raises her as a daughter, and finally has to surrender her to the pagan supernatural world that understands her better than Christian men ever will. It wants to be a fierce story about motherhood, female protection, monsters, rape, superstition, Christianity versus the old gods, and the danger of naming a woman monstrous because she refuses to be harmless. Mostly, it is a stark but very narrow myth-retelling that keeps driving the same point into the same frozen ground: men fear what women are, and women survive by trusting older, darker powers.

The novel opens with Halla making hay at Hvammur, her prosperous farm in Eyrarfjord. She is a widow, and the book makes clear at once that widowhood suits her better than marriage ever did. Her late husband Árni was old, stupid, smelly, rude, and useful mainly as a source of pregnancies she did not especially want. Halla gave birth to eleven children, only five of whom survived, and she now runs the farm with a hard competence no man around her wants to respect. Hvammur is protected by an ancient barrow, the mound of a dead settler who supposedly guards the land. No one with evil intentions toward the household can sleep there safely.

One day, two young farmhands from Brekka come running over the ridge: Þóra, newly delivered of a child, and the baby’s father, Þráinn. They are terrified. The baby, they say, turned blue, died, then was replaced by something else. A changeling. They have left it on Big Rock and are running to fetch Reverend Sigfús. Halla, who has no patience for foolishness around newborns, goes to the rock and finds not a monster but a red-faced, furious, hungry infant. Reverend Sigfús refuses to baptize the child because its parents insist it is not theirs and because he fears whatever may live in it. Halla, disgusted by the cowardice of priest and parents alike, takes the baby home.