Stefan Spjut's Stallo begins, like the new hit Swedish TV series, Jordskott, with a young child disappearing into the woods.  It's 1978, and a mother believes her son was taken by a giant but no one believes her.  Fast-forward to 2004, when another boy disappears. A photographer who runs a paranormal crypto-zoologist website, is determined to prove that giant trolls exist and that someone is protecting them. Stallo, the Lapland folklore word for troll, is slow burn, restrained Scandi-horror, in the tradition of John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let The Right One In. As ever, it's the humans that are the most terrifying.

RHETORIC OF MODERN DEATH IN AMERICAN LIVING DEAD FILMS
By Outi Hakola. Intellect. $73.

Death is the ultimate frontier. Or, as it was put in the 1958 The Return of Dracula, "only this clumsy flesh stands between you and me". Hakola, a lecturer at the University of Helsinki, in an overly academic text, analyses American "living dead" films since the early 20th century to highlight changing American views of death-related values. Hakola particularly focuses on portrayals of zombies, vampires and mummies in movies such as Dracula, The Mummy, The Night of the Living Dead, the True Blood TV series and World War Z, revealing how the living dead films moved from traditional perceptions of death to more marginalised contemporary ones.

THE LONEY
By Andrew Michael Hurley. John Murray. $29.99.

The Loney was first published by the small British press Tartarus in 2014, with such success that it has now been republished for a wider global audience.  Every Easter, a Catholic family make a pilgrimage to the "Loney", a bleak waterlogged section of the British north-west coastline, in the hope that God will "cure" their mute autistic child. Hurley's debut novel brings together, in a heady psychological horror mix, bizarre locals, including a pregnant 14-year-old girl who may have healing powers, a suffocating "mutther" bordering on religious mania and dark secrets within the Catholic church. Comparisons with the cult movie, The Wicker Man, are decidedly appropriate.