Thursday Thriller: Outside by Ragnar Jónasson
I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.
Mogsy’s Rating: 2 of 5 stars
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Series: Stand Alone
Publisher: Minotaur Books | Macmillan Audio (June 28, 2022)
Length: 352 pages | 5 hrs and 19 mins
Author Information: Website | Twitter
Four friends go on an holiday to a remote hunting lodge in the Icelandic highlands, and get stuck in a snowstorm. Certainly sounds like a promising start to a Nordic Noir thriller, and I’ve been intrigued by Outside due to my fascination with horror and mystery stories set in cold, isolated places. Unfortunately though, this turned out to be quite the dud.
But first, a bit about the plot. Daniel, Helena, Armann, and Gunnalaugur have known each other since their college days, but while they may call themselves friends, sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. All of them are hiding secrets from each other, from old grudges to petty jealousies, and none of them seem to Gunnalaugur, a strange one whom they seemed to have invited along out of pity. Armann is an entrepreneur who has turned a little tour company he started to a successful enterprise, and wanting to do something nice for his friends, invited them along to a ptarmigan hunt in the Eastern Highlands of Iceland.
Everything is going relatively well until a bad snowstorm rolls in unexpectedly, forcing the hunters to retreat to shelter early, but the problems begin as soon as they arrive at the cabin. First, it’s locked, with the keys stored behind a secured lockbox to which no one knows the code, not even Armann, who is supposed to be their guide. And then, there’s what they find inside the cabin after they break their way inside. What awaited them gave each of the four friends a shock, with a couple of them second guessing their decision to stay in the shelter, but with the frigid temperatures and the storm raging outside, there’s no place else for anyone to go.
A non-story, that’s the best way I can describe Outside. The prose certainly does its best hype up the tensions and excitement on every page, but at the end of the day, there’s no disguising the fact that hardly anything happened. Without spoiling anything, what the four friends encountered would have been considered a rather alarming albeit minor inconvenience to anyone else, providing everyone keeps their cool and aren’t a bunch of incompetent idiots.
To be fair, that’s not to say our characters were all idiots, but they each had their individual hang ups and manufactured dramas which were used in contrived ways to move the story along. The narrative cycles through their four different viewpoints, mainly focusing on their backstories. Normally, this sort of device would work well for me, but in the case of Outside, it fell flat. Namely, it was hard to care about the past when the present was so immediate, and so-called reveals into the characters’ situations failed to provide much insight into their current motivations.
At best, I think this book would work better as a short story or novella, since the content was so sparse. Ragnar Jonasson isn’t an author I’ve heard of before, but apparently he’s quite prolific and his books are quite popular, so maybe there’s just something lost in translation.
The BiblioSanctum 
It’s a pity that the novel turned out so disappointing, because the premise – although quite familiar in the genre – sounds promising. Well, not every cake bakes as well as expected… 😉
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Yeah, the idea behind it was good, but it didn’t feel like the most thought out!
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Oh too bad for this one…
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Yeah, a shame! I was so looking forward to it!
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Let me guess what they found inside the cabin. Feel free to tell me if I’m wrong:
1) Only ONE snickers bar that was past its expiration date
2) The toilet was plugged up
3) The maids had forgotten to make up the beds
4) The abominable snowman’s son was having a rave
I realize you don’t want to spoil things, so you don’t have to tell me which one it was, but a winks as good as a nod, jus’ sayin’.
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LOL I’ll spoil it for you because I think you would appreciate it. The surprise turned out to be a guy with a gun pointed at them. But he was paralyzed and couldn’t move. That was enough to get the four friends traumatized though. I can’t help but think if it had been four American hunters, they’d been like, “whoa buddy!” *moves out of line of sight* “Let’s take that before ya hurt yourself, shall we?” *plucks gun from paralyzed hand* The End.
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Are you serious? Hahahahahahaaa. Oh maaaaaan.
And your ending is how it “should” be 😀
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So serious! And then of course, inevitably someone gets squirrely and accidentally discharges their hunting rifle. Hard to imagine something like this happening in the US where most hunters are comfy with their firearms. It’s easy to forget the cultural differences surrounding guns.
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I have heard of this author before and I’ve always been curious about his books, but without a strong plot this is a hard no for me.
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This was my first time hearing of the author, I don’t know if I would try out another one of his books. Maybe if it was longer and had more story!
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I’ve heard of the author but don’t really know anything about his work and haven’t tried it. I saw this one turn up at some point and like you I was attracted to the setting and general setup, but also noticed many reviews that sound similar to yours, so it appears this one disappointed many folks. I’m curious to try the author but I’m passing on this particular book.
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I might be willing to try another of the author’s books! But yeah, I really can’t recommend this one.
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Well a non story is bad indeed! Sorry it was a miss Mogsy.
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Thanks, hoping my next thriller will be better!
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Hah maybe not for me, maybe all the idiots cN die
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Aww, tis a shame. Not for me, thanks for the revealing review.
Lynn 😀
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