Simon Stålenhag’s “The Labyrinth” Book Review: A New Terrifying and Timely Sci-Fi Story From the Artist Behind “Tales From the Loop”
This has been a big year for artist and author Simon Stålenhag. In April, a television series adaptation of his debut book, Tales from the Loop, was released. Shortly after, his past collaborators Fria Ligan (who are known for their tabletop roleplaying games and are responsible for the games based on Stålenhag’s work) launched a wildly successful Kickstarter for a strategy board game based on the book.
Later in the year, Fria Ligan launched another Kickstarter, this time for Stålenhag’s latest book — The Labyrinth. The book is now shipping just in time for the holidays, and as a backer I had a chance to take a look at a digital version of the book as I wait for the physical edition that I can add to my collection. Here are my thoughts, upon reading and re-reading The Labyrinth.
The Labyrinth follows a small group of people living through a catastrophic and unexplainable global phenomenon. The world has been reduced to complete ruins, with mysterious cosmic objects destroying everything in their paths and slowly making the air unbreathable. A select group of survivors has retreated into underground bunkers, sometimes emerging for the sake of scientific expeditions to study the otherworldly transformations that have occurred to the landscape.
The book follows three people: The narrator, named Sigrid; her brother Matt; and a mysterious young boy named Charlie. The three are traveling to a vacant station outside of the bunkers so the older two can go on excursions to a decrepit city and take samples while the troubled child can get a change of pace from his life underground. As the narrator makes sure to insist, it’s not a particularly dangerous plan, as they’ve been doing this without the child for months and have no reason to believe anything will go wrong.
Stålenhag is able to establish his characters with relatively little time spent with them. Small interactions demonstrate how desperate Matt is to connect with Charlie, deriving joy and pride from being able to get even a tiny smile out of him. Sigrid, on the other hand, is focused and logical, taking in these interactions from her periphery while deep in thought or completing a task. She tries her best to keep her emotions separate from her being, acting as an apparently grounded narrator even among the chaos of the world she’s living in.
While Stålenhag was not inspired from the ongoing pandemic in creating this book (he had already more or less completed it by the time the pandemic began, and had moved on to his next, upcoming project), The Labyrinth feels all the more appropriate in the state of the world that it did end up releasing in. While civilization hasn’t been reduced to ash (yet!), the book does capture a certain anxiety that exists right now. And the intended themes represented in the book are simply exemplified by current events. The great moral choices made and the intense incompetence by the government and general public that is shown in the book is not unlike what we’d see today. One line especially stood out to me:
“It was painful to have to see the world collapse as the politicians and the public spent all their time trying to assign blame to someone.”
How appropriate.
Now, it’s not all that surprising that Stålenhag’s sentiments ring true, as they aren’t remotely new. They can apply to the pandemic, of course, but there are so many other circumstances where the same has been true. As tends to be the case with science-fiction, Stålenhag was commenting on a recurring fault in humanity that would be true in a situation as catastrophic and as far removed from our current timeline as the book depicts, just as it is true in real life. The pandemic simply proves that he was onto something in his depictions.
As we can expect from Stålenhag, the art contained within this book is simply gorgeous. While he has ventured deeper and deeper into narrative fiction, there’s no mistaking that Stålenhag is a visual artist. His brush-like visual style gives his pieces a timeless feel, as if they were just as likely to have been painted on physical media decades ago as digitally realized on a computer. Much of the atmosphere he is able to generate is thanks to these paintings. They can be rather unsettling, even if in an inexplicable way, but it’s hard to look away from the intricate details that Stålenhag is able to produce. While The Labyrinth takes place in a desolate, homogenous world, Stålenhag still manages to make the images intriguing. The visual language is less varied than in his previous books, but that’s by design and necessity given the circumstances of the book. This isn’t a colorful cyberpunk dystopian city, it’s a world full of ruins, ash, and dense smog.
I don’t intend this to be a spoiler review, so there is a limit to what I will mention. However, Stålenhag sets up the central mysteries and intrigue of his plot beautifully. As the reader, we are the only ones left out on what is going on, as the narrator methodically reveals the situation to us, from the start to her present situation. At the beginning, we only know that a few things are true, and we don’t know why there are true. Sigrid begins her narration from a prison-like cell, and vows to tell the story from the beginning of how she got there. As she tells the story, we find that Charlie is a very troubled and clearly damaged child, but we don’t know why. We also know that Matt is incredibly determined to help Charlie, as if by obligation. As the story progresses, more pieces get added to the puzzle, and eventually it becomes a cohesive and startling whole.
In tone, The Labyrinth is much closer to The Electric State than Stålenhag’s previous two books. It follows a quite linear story, as opposed to the scattered vignettes of Tales from the Loop or Things from the Flood, focusing on a small stretch of time that concerns just a few people. Worldbuilding largely occurs implicitly rather than through tons of exposition, as what primarily matters in these stories is the particular situation the characters are in. The events that are taking place are happening on a large scale, but we are exposed to only this slice of it, which is very effective in allowing the narrative to feel authentic.
However, elements of Stålenhag’s earlier work are still very present. The mysterious orbs that cause the destruction of the world in The Labyrinth are similar to the titular Loop of Tales from the Loop. We are told nothing about either, both seemingly outside the realms of human science and understanding. While the Loop seemingly serves humanity in a largely positive way (at least until the destructive events of the the sequel), the black orbs cannot be harnessed by humanity, and instead serve purely for the purpose of destruction. The destruction caused directly by the orbs themselves cannot be blamed on people, but the handling of the events that follow expose the deepest faults of humanity. There’s a sense of inevitability to the destruction, and there’s value to understanding how humanity would go about those final days when all is going to hell.
Without delving into specifics, The Labyrinth is perhaps the darkest work Stålenhag has put out thus far. It goes to visually and conceptually gruesome places, and focuses more on this explicit terror than previous works of his. The Electric State is more upsetting on a psychological level, as it works to get under the reader’s skin in a quieter way, but The Labyrinth contains some very shocking, terrifying moments. Regardless, it represents the science-fiction brilliance we have come to expect from Stålenhag. The Electric State is still my personal favorite of his works, though, upon further processing and re-reading of this latest opus, anything can change. Again and again, Stålenhag has cemented his ability to create fantastic science-fiction worlds, from the intriguing and darkly beautiful art to the intelligent and compelling narratives. If you’ve read and enjoyed his work before, this will be no exception. And if you’ve not yet been exposed to his work, there’s never a bad time to start. Come to marvel at his intricate paintings, and stay for the stories he crafts.
Art from The Labyrinth can be found on Simon Stålenhag’s website. The book is not yet available for retail purchase, but will be available from retailers in the near future, as well as on Fria Ligan’s website.
If you liked this review, check out this related piece:
Amazon’s Tales from the Loop: Seeking mundanity in a wondrous science fiction world
