WILL DEAN

From an isolated cabin in a boggy Swedish forest, Will Dean conjures a fascinating series and now an intense standalone full of claustrophobia and creepiness.

- Craig Sisterson

A teenager sits in a wooden hut atop a small hill, reading. It’s summer in the rural landscapes of eastern England; usually the berry farm would be bustling, and the teen would be rushed off his feet weighing the strawberries and raspberries customers have picked for themselves. But today it’s raining, nobody is there, so he can read. The metal box for the cash and the weighing scales lay idle. As does the shotgun the farmer gave him to protect the takings from robbers. So, the teenager reads in the hut with fresh air and a view over the fruit farm. He’s enjoying the beautiful isolation; it’s his favorite reading time and he devours Trainspotting, then Frankenstein.

Talking to Will Dean now, the fondness of that childhood memory bubbles through in our video chat. A quarter of a century has passed since he was that bookish teen growing up among the villages and rural landscapes of the East Midlands, but several things are similar.

Will Dean’s favorite place is still an isolated “wooden hut” surrounded by rural landscapes—though now it’s the self-built cabin where he and his family live in a boggy Swedish elk forest. He also keeps a smaller office hut on their property. Reading is still one of his very favorite things.

There is one stark difference however, beyond the thick beard Dean now sports: the hut where he now sits as we talk is for writing as well as reading. Something teen Dean never could have envisaged.

“No one in my family had ever worked in the arts or anything like that,” he says. “They’re all very practical people, painters and decorators and that kind of thing. My Mum works in a childcare nursery. So, I was like, ‘People like me can’t be writers.’”