The big discovery of last year for me was Ivan Belov’s Zastupa series; the third book came out just recently, and I’m going to read it as soon as it starts being sold in an ebook version. In my review I praised the first two books a lot, and someone wrote to me that in that case I absolutely had to read another one that came out in the same The Scariest Book series.
That was The Knówer: Bonds of Hell, co-authored by German Shenderov and Sergey Tarasov. Originally, German Shenderov had written only a short story, “Khryashchekhmyl,” which appeared in his short story collection back in 2022. But later he wrote two more stories about the same character, after which Sergey Tarasov joined the series, and together with Shenderov he finished the book—what has now become a novel in stories. And the original “Khryashchekhmyl” became only the first chapter of this book, changing its title to “Atonement.” And already as a novel, the book came out in 2025.
The recommendation—and then the blurb—won me over. The story is set mostly in 1965, in a small Belarusian village, where a local knówer lives and fights evil spirits. Folklore, and on Belarusian soil that’s native to me… I just couldn’t pass it by.
Honestly, it’s not very clear why the authors chose Belarusian countryside as the backdrop in the first place. German Shenderov was born and raised in Moscow Oblast, and later moved to Munich. Sergey Tarasov lives even farther from Belarus—he’s a metallurgist from Eastern Siberia, as it says on the The Scariest Book series website. So their knowledge of Belarus doesn’t seem to be first-hand. And as I read, I kept finding myself wondering: are the authors actually that familiar with Belarusian culture at all?
And that doubt kept growing with every page. Having chosen a rural setting, the authors gave their characters local color: all of them speak not Russian, but трасянка (trasyanka, “mixed Belarusian-Russian speech”), as the book itself puts it. In Belarus, трасянка (trasyanka) is what people call a blend of several languages, and a huge number of people really do communicate this way—most often in the countryside, in particular. As a rule, it’s not just Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish words all thrown into one pile. It can also be words from one language, but pronounced according to the rules of another. For example, there’s a fairly well-known word among Belarusians—ашчушчэнне (ashchushchenne, “sensation/feeling”)—a typical case, because Belarusian doesn’t actually have such a word: the Belarusian equivalent of the Russian ощущение (oshchushchenie, “sensation/feeling”) would be адчуванне (adchuvanne). But that really is how people talk, and in a lot of places. In Ukraine, a similar mix is called суржик (surzhyk, “mixed speech”).
At this point I want to state it plainly: I didn’t like this book. And below I’m mostly going to write about why. If facts like that aren’t interesting to you, feel free to stop right here so you don’t waste your time.
Well then—let’s continue. I’ve read several reviews praising how well the authors captured the flavor of a Belarusian village. For me, it was driving me up the wall. Because what the authors present as trasyanka isn’t trasyanka at all. Belarusian words written in Russian letters are often mangled, because even if you really wanted to add some “Belarusianness,” you could at least have kept a transliteration of the actual pronunciation. Write дрэнна (drenna, “bad”), the way it’s pronounced in Belarusian (and in trasyanka), instead of дренна (drenna) or, in some places, even дрянно (dryanno).
What’s more, in many places they pass off as Belarusian words that don’t exist in Belarusian at all, but do exist in Ukrainian. And you could understand that if the story took place near Ukraine: along borders, languages get mixed. But the authors explicitly say the village is about 100 kilometers from Minsk, and from Minsk to Ukraine you’re looking at, at best, a minimum of two-hundred-something kilometers. So it’s unlikely that in a village like that they’d call a daughter доня (donya, “dear daughter”), when in Belarusian it’s дачка (dachka, “daughter”). And instead of the Ukrainian будь ласка (bud’ laska, “please”), people in Belarus say калi ласка (kali laska, “please”).
And there are tons of examples like this. At first I even marked them all for myself, and then I stopped, because it was just too frequent—I kept having to get distracted. Especially since the authors themselves couldn’t decide what language their characters were speaking. One moment they’d switch to more or less clean Russian, and the next they’d use, in their “trasyanka,” sometimes a Russian word and sometimes a Belarusian one for the same term. In real life, nobody talks like that. If it’s ашчушчэнне (ashchushchenne), then it’s always that, and only that.
An extra little cherry on top for me was the phrase «Не деревня даже, а вёска» (“Not even a derevnya, but a vioska”). Because in Belarusian, вёска (vioska) is exactly what “village” is—деревня (derevnya) is “village,” too. So literally it comes out as “not even a village, but a village.” What?!
So all this pseudo-Belarusian stuff was a major minus for me—as a Belarusian. It’s like taking your language and butchering it every which way, while insisting that this is exactly how people speak.
The authors show the same kind of “knowledge” in other areas too, just to a lesser extent. For example, describing the start of the Great Patriotic War, they write: “The Germans reached Belarus quickly—it hadn’t even been a month”. I nearly yelled out loud. The Germans entered Belarus on June 22, 1941, in the early hours of the morning (the attack began around 3:15 a.m., not at four, like the song goes). A month?! Minutes!
Then a milkmaid explains to a boy that she took a summer job at the cowshed because “they pay well.” The authors, apparently, aren’t aware that in the USSR, up until 1966, villages weren’t paid in money, but in trudodni, (“workday credits”), which were worth basically nothing. And in the novel it’s 1965, which is stated very clearly.
In a dream, one of the characters sees Gagarin, who, quote, “pulled a the Maxim machine gun out from behind his back,” then fired it at some aliens and “lowered it.” Come on, guys—have you ever even seen a Maxim machine gun in your life? How do you pull that from behind your back, or “lower” it?
Somewhere else the hero mentions that he really loves the famous song Смуглянка-молдаванка (Smuglyanka-Moldavanka, “Dark-Eyed Moldavian Girl”). In theory, he could’ve known it, but in 1965, in some far-off village—very unlikely. That song was choral/vocal, and it was performed at very rare concerts up until 1973, when Leonid Bykov’s film В бой идут одни старики (Only “Old Men” Are Going into Battle) came out with a new arrangement and made the song genuinely beloved by everyone. But in 1965, in a village… “I don’t believe it!”, as Stanislavsky used to say.
Against that background, the fact that the car’s tires burn down completely already feels like a total trifle—but then, literally fifty pages later, the characters forget about it and keep driving around the area in that same car, basically on bare rims. And it doesn’t bother them one bit.
I mean, if you’re working with real-world details, then at least do your homework and stick to your own facts, instead of cramming in everything that seems like it fits.
So I had a lot of questions about the authors’ professionalism. But let’s talk about the book itself and the plot. It’s not small at all—over 140,000 words.
And here, too, things aren’t nearly as rosy. At first it really is interesting to see how creatures known from folklore will be woven into the heroes’ adventures—how they affect everyday life, which of them are genuinely harmful, and which are, on the whole, even helpful. But that side of it is barely explored. If the first chapter stands on its own, then after that the authors plunge us into one big story with lots of episodes, but all of them lead to a single ending.
At the same time, the events, in my view, are stretched out way too much, and they just can’t keep the pacing steady. The characters themselves are pretty cardboard—almost none of them really develops. And their motivations aren’t always clear, either. A lot of what they do feels either strange or forced. For a lofty goal you can go pretty far, sure, but people don’t change that easily. You can’t take someone who, just yesterday, wanted to help everyone close to them and God forbid have anything to do with black sorcerers, and then turn them, already tomorrow, into someone ready to kill those same loved ones and revel in other people’s pain. Explaining all of that with “that’s what we need for our goal” isn’t much of a justification.
Meanwhile, the main story gradually shifts toward deals with devils—with Hell. And the more the heroes come into contact with this Hell, the more the authors describe all the inner workings of that part of the universe. But if they say little about good—or at least harmless—creatures, then the nastier the beast, the more attention it gets in the book.
I caught myself starting to feel like the authors weren’t as interested in the story itself as they were in savoring descriptions of every kind of filth and nastiness. And the filthier, the more disgusting the description—the better. And on top of that, you just have to throw in more crude details and completely unnecessary little episodes that add nothing to the narrative—like this:
Akulina suddenly squatted down, hitched her skirt up to her buttocks, and let out a stream of stinking brown urine.
The authors seem to have some kind of fixation on all this filthy darkness.
And the main narrative line… it basically turned out to be a total nothingburger. It ended abruptly, with an instant “switcheroo” where the bad guy suddenly becomes the good guy, and the good guy becomes the bad guy (and it’s completely unclear why). Another character, who was also all for everything good and against everything bad, suddenly for some reason turns into a villain… why? for what? There’s no answer.
I kept almost dropping the book a few times, but I still wanted to find out how it would all end. I found out—and I clearly shouldn’t have bothered.
Like I said, the authors are more interested in describing filthy things than in building a logical, interesting plot. I don’t understand why this was recommended to me. I mean, I couldn’t even find any kind words for it, even though I usually try to find at least something good in a book.
My rating: 1.5/5
