The Darkest Room

Throughout his life, Johan Theorin has been a regular visitor to the Baltic Island of Öland. His mother's family - sailors, fishermen and farmers - have lived there for centuries, nurturing the island's rich legacy of strange tales and folklore.

A journalist by profession, Johan lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.

'The dead are our neighbours everywhere on the island, and you have to get used to it.'

It is bitter mid-winter on the Swedish island of Oland, and Katrine and Joakim Westin have moved with their children to the boarded-up manor house at Eel Point. But their remote idyll is soon shattered when Katrine is found drowned off the rocks nearby. As Joakim struggles to keep his sanity in the wake of the tragedy, the old house begins to exert a strange hold over him.

Joakim has never been in the least superstitious, but from where are those whispering noises coming? To whom does his daughter call out in the night? And why is the barn door for ever ajar?

As the end of the year approaches, and the infamous winter storm moves in across Oland, Joakim begins to fear that the most spine-chilling story he's heard about Eel Point might indeed be true: that every Christmas the dead return...