Den som vaktar flocken
(Guarding the Flock)
by Johan Rundberg
reviewed by James Walker
At the beginning of the novel, a gruesome scene is stumbled upon in a local wood by a neighbour on his way to work. A middle-aged man and woman are dead and standing by them is a teenage girl holding a shotgun. She has her eyes closed, and when asked why, she says that vargen, ‘the wolf’ told her to keep them shut.
With this scene firmly imprinted on the reader’s mind, Rundberg then introduces the main characters, Sanna and Martin Oscarson and their teenage children: Teo, the eldest and Mya his sister.
The Oscarson family live in a nice house in Täby, an affluent Stockholm suburb, where Martin is the partner in a successful estate agency business. Sanna is about to start a new job, away from the private sector where she used to work in communications and into a new position working for the local municipality.
Martin, we learn, comes from a rather well-off family whilst Sanna’s family background seems murkier. They socialise mainly with Martin’s friends and family with Sanna feeling somewhat of an outsider and never entirely at ease.
Against this cosy suburban idyll things start to go wrong when Mya, their daughter is in trouble again. She had problems at school previously but these seemed to have been sorted out by the time the story is set, when she is in her ninth year at school.
Mya’s parents are summoned to the school due to a film that has been widely circulated on social media. In it, Mya names fellow pupils in the school and says they should be killed. In the film she is seen to point her hand as if holding a gun and as if taking aim and shooting a person off-camera. As she is the only person who can be seen, she ends up having to carry the can when she refuses to name her accomplice in the filming. As it turns out, her accomplice is called Wilk, her only friend and confidant. There are a lot of unanswered questions about Wilk, especially concerning his background.
Mya is consequently suspended from school. Because of the subject matter and film content, the police have been informed. To make matters worse, due to comments Mya makes to her teachers about her parents’ behaviour at home (they have installed a new security system and Mya accuses them of spying on her and her brother) they are reported to the local authorities for a potential ‘abuse’ investigation.
Things start to spiral out of control.
Whilst such a rather innocuous film on social media and the domestic dispute do not seem to be obvious ingredients for a thriller, Rundberg is nevertheless very clever in weaving the Oscarson family’s lives into one as the plot unfolds.
Enough said!
The book is almost five hundred pages long and despite the above comments about the intricate and clever plot etc., Rundberg seems to hurry to get to a conclusion, to the extent that, for this reader, after such a masterly wending and weaving, it fell flat at the end and indeed, with a somewhat unsatisfactory tying up of the various narrative threads.
This is Johan Rundberg’s first adult thriller. He is previously known for and has been awarded prizes, including the revered August Prize for his books for a younger audience.
His prose is rich and his use of dialogue is superlative and perhaps in any future novels, he will give the narrative time to run its course.
Nonetheless, Den som vaktar flocken (Guarding the Flock) is a very good read.
Den som vaktar flocken
Bokförlaget Forum, 2025, 496 pages
Foreign Rights: Bonnier Rights
Johan Rundberg is a successful author of books for middle-grade readers. His Nattkorpen (The Night Raven), which was reviewed in SBR 2021:2, was awarded the August Prize in 2021 for Best Children's Book. In 2023 he won the Astrid Lindgren Prize. Den som vaktar flocken is his debut for adult readers.