“It is the consequence of objective unyielding laws. Once she finishes this task, she is accepted into the Institute of Special Technologies in the remote town of Torpa.
She then returns home, gets a few months reprieve before Farit reappears and assigns her a new task. Sasha spends the rest of her vacation being psychologically conditioned to obey Farit’s demands. Farit doesn’t care how the task is accomplished so long as it is done. It’s up to Sasha to come up with the appropriate lies to tell her mother. It’s not like Farit is asking for the impossible. For this she will be well compensated (after each swim she pukes up gold coins). Well apparently, all he wants is for her to wake up every day at 04:00 in the morning, go to the beach, undress, swim one hundred meters and touch a buoy. Sasha’s mother thinks she is being ridiculous, but her mother is not the one forced to keep repeating the same day over and over again. All she knows is that she is afraid of him, and that he is following her. On her way back from the beach, Sasha encounters Farit Kozhenikov, although she doesn’t know his name at the time, or anything about him for that matter. This is happiness, happiness stolen away by the man with the dark glasses. She has been looking forward to this vacation for months: to the water, the waves and a chance to just swim. It’s not complicated.”Īlexandra (Sasha) Samokhina is with her single mother on a seaside vacation. But it is in your best interest to do everything I ask of you. I really don’t want to tell you all this. Every day people fall down, break their bones, die under the wheels of a car, drown, get hepatitis or tuberculosis. Because the world around you is very fragile. And when that psychological horror turns out to also be an honest to goodness fantasy? Well that is Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Fear, paranoia, desperation and then despair, generated by suggestion rather than action, these are the characteristics of a good psychological horror. Any person with a hold over the character will suffice. It can be any idea, or any suggestion, and it doesn’t have to come from a crazed murderer. Not the fear of the crazed murderer confronting a woman in the shower, but rather fear of the idea of what will happen to that woman if she doesn’t do what he says. Psychological horror is a genre in which fear is the dominant theme. Should I try and tie the book to Ukraine somehow? See if I can find a connection to the Soviet Union or the post-Communist era? Maybe there is something to be said about Ukrainian/ Russian/ Soviet university dorms (I’ll get to that), and see if I can compare them to British Boarding Schools for unwanted children (no idea)? Or maybe I should talk about fear and psychological horror? Let’s go with that. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea where to start.
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