The Body Severed from the Shadow: Re-Opening Old Wounds and the Birth of Shining

On Niklas Kvarforth’s Re-Opening Old Wounds

By Zeynep Çolakoğlu

“But if I hammer a word in like a nail, I want it to fester within the sentence like a wound pierced with a hundred holes.”

Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society²

 

I close my eyes. In my glass is a Thracian Cabernet Sauvignon staring into suffering³. Scenes unfold one after another, and I cannot open my eyes again.

I read Niklas Kvarforth’s Re-Opening Old Wounds while listening to Shining’s discography. This is not merely a biography recounting the band’s past. It tells of Shining’s birth, its transformations and the agonising journey towards Halmstad, from within the mind that created it.

This work occupies a place apart from other autobiographical books that focus on the wasted efforts, suffering, deprivation and processes of value creation hidden behind success. For there is real darkness here: one that flays the skin from words and tears apart the body of memory. In Kvarforth’s world, self-destruction and suicide become a dark aesthetic; death is the only truth.

It is only a book, I tell myself. At most, it should smell of the vanillin released by the breakdown of lignin. But no, it does not. Sulphur settles over its pages, and Pandemonium’s smoke rises. I should have known from the sharpening of its words. Each page makes a separate cut, opens another wound.

You wander through Kvarforth’s cells. The book consumes you the way an ancient vampire drains your blood. The strains of Shining, never absent from your ears, become part of the experience. Once you open the cover, you find yourself face to face with truth in its ugliest form. Until you close the final page, you have to bear witness to this darkness collapsing over you.

It is worth it.

Opening the Cover, Opening the Wound

Re-Opening Old Wounds is not a book for everyone. For readers who do not want to face Kvarforth’s merciless ideas about human nature, his hatred of society and the destruction he turns upon himself, stepping back may be an understandable choice.

The human soul is not always a kind of Purgatory in which good and evil change places according to circumstance. There are also misanthropic souls living in absolute solitude, feeling no bond with humanity. This book leads the reader into such a mind, or offers a familiar universe to those already there.

If you dare, you can meet his world by opening the wound.

By the wound, I mean the pages of the book.

The book’s most important value lies in providing direct access to Shining’s inner history. In the media, the band has often become visible not through its musical structure and artistic transformation, but through Kvarforth’s behaviour, stage performances and rhetoric of violence, blood and suicide. Sensationalism eclipsed the music. Re-Opening Old Wounds moves beyond this superficial narrative by revealing the creative process behind the songs and albums.

Readers who were able to access When Prozac No Longer Helps in English or through translations into their own languages will have discovered the depth of Shining’s lyrics. Yet Re-Opening Old Wounds reveals the deeper meanings of those lyrics by recounting the conditions in which the words were born, what happened and the transformation the music underwent.

As one of the translators who carried Kvarforth’s voice into Turkish through song lyrics, what struck me most about him was his sincerity and the reality behind his words. Unlike people who move through life in masks, chasing spectacle or seeking the approval of the Big Other, Kvarforth rejects social norms, curses humanity and has bound himself, with blood and passion, to the art he has created from the beginning.

There is a dark conviction within him: No matter what happens, you will create.

The Geography Where Darkness Was Born

In the book, the Swedish black metal scene becomes part of the story alongside musicians, producers and organisers. Reading it feels like a journey into Scandinavia’s past, where black metal took shape around hatred, pain and misanthropic thought. There is a formation spreading slowly underground like couch grass. Inspired by the music, people begin to gather in bars, rehearsal rooms, studios and at concerts. We see all of this through Kvarforth’s eyes, looking beyond the movement’s dusty and sulphurous atmosphere.

The veins that feed black metal have never run in only one direction. Although death, misanthropy and melancholy are important parts of this darkness, literature, philosophy, mythology and occultism have also seeped into the genre’s atmosphere. Indeed, while translating musicians’ works, I sensed that the smell of books had always permeated black metal. Some will recognise traces of Stig Dagerman in Shining’s lyrics. Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf also inhabits this literary darkness. These are disquieting works that rain desolation and isolation down upon the reader from different angles.

Re-Opening Old Wounds shows how the Shining sound was born from dark abysses, while also making us reconsider the power of music. It is not easy to understand how it passes from one soul to another, how it affects the listener, how, in musicians’ lives, it can turn into an assault and how it can slowly dissolve certain lives.

The Heartbeats of a Place

Have you ever heard the existential agony of a place or the heartbeat of its walls?

In the universe of horror, a place absorbs the life that touches it. When you learn about the setting in which Within Deep Dark Chambers was created, you witness how the soul of that place took on the form of melodies.

Learning the ominous stories behind the songs and reading them in parallel with the lyrics gave me a pleasure close to jouissance. A pleasure born from discomfort, offering no comfort.

The stories of how the songs were born should be read while listening to the albums. The darkness that Claws of Perdition casts across two separate albums is a good example⁴. Because Claws of Perdition is not merely a song; it has become a vessel for loss, repetition and destruction in Shining’s history.

Towards Halmstad

The movement and excitement at the beginning of the book slow as the narrative approaches the Halmstad era. Reading the rush of the early chapters was as thrilling as moving through a suspense story. Towards the end, as more people and details enter the narrative, this momentum fades somewhat.

Yet the tragicomic part was that my entire effort as a reader had already been directed towards reaching this point. I wanted to see how Kvarforth’s path crossed with Peter Huss and how Halmstad was created. By the end of the book, you realise that you have witnessed how this album was constructed from the very beginning.

Halmstad is the album that made Shining Shining. It is not a work that can be heard in fragments. It is a whole that falls like a hammer and, once begun, must be heard to the end.

In the book, Shining’s blood-soaked concerts, violence, outbursts of rage and tours filled with madness become a dizzying birth story. Line by line, we read the price of dedicating oneself to a work and overturning one’s life for its sake.

As people’s names lose their meaning over time, the tracks gain more meaning. The acoustic guitars in Besvikelsens Dystra Monotoni, the progressive structure that moves beyond the rules in order to reach the essence of black metal, the rage grinning through the vocals on The Eerie Cold and that black sound reaching maturity on Halmstad acquire their own stories within the book.

We expect to read where those absurd words at the beginning of The Eerie Cold came from, how the Halmstad line-up was formed so unexpectedly, and about the constant problems with record labels, only to learn of a production ordeal worse than any of them.

These take Shining’s history beyond a list of albums and dates and turn it into an agonising process of creation.

The Body Severed from the Shadow

Shining is, in fact, Kvarforth’s shadow-being. What breathes life into it again and again is his mind-piercing music, which leaves its trace everywhere.

By the end of the book, you feel Shining break away from Kvarforth’s shadow-self and acquire an independent existence. It lives, breathes, hates, and curses. It has a language that will make your skin crawl wherever you hear it.

This shudder is not always pleasant. It is the kind that could tear apart anyone without an inclination towards melancholy.

But is that not the point?

To make one more cut directly over the wounds!

Black metal’s historical relationship with death, misanthropy and melancholy takes on a more personal and psychological form in Shining’s music. What matters here is not only the genre’s dark heritage, but how Kvarforth reshapes it through his own shadow-self.

Violence, self-destruction, madness, blood, stitch marks and what happened in the darkness of the north pile up on the book’s pages. Yet beneath all this, the urge to create remains. Shining suffers, presses hard against human loneliness, materialises its struggles and keeps moving forward with the dark fantasy in its mind.

I read the book breathlessly, constantly thinking of the next page. It was striking to witness what kind of body Shining evolved into after the journeys of suffering that ran through its stormy career.

Guided by Kvarforth’s voice, I felt myself moving step by step through the albums, watching their births and hearing their labour pains. The imagery formed in my mind probably came from the sincerity and emotional inflection of his narration.

This is a story of Shining told through venomous language and an ironic gaze, yet strangely full of life. It carries on as far as Halmstad; clearly, there is more to come.

What you hold in your hands is the history of Shining, damned beneath a sulphurous sky.

A gift bestowed upon Nietzsche’s grandchildren to shatter morality.

In short, a one-way ticket to hell.

Nothing could darken your life further.

Niklas Kvarfoth. Photo credit: Claudio Marino.

Notes:

1 Niklas Kvarforth, Re-Opening Old Wounds: The Official Shining Biography, Book One (The Sinister Print, 2026).

Re-Opening Old Wounds: Book One, Official Page

2 Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, trans. Atakan Karaduman, Istanbul: 6:45 Yayın, 2026, p. 10.

3 Chamlija Django 2019, a Thracian Cabernet Sauvignon.

4 The completed version of “Claws of Perdition” appeared on Shining’s IV / The Eerie Cold, while the raw mix salvaged from the deleted recordings appeared on the compilation Through Years of Oppression. The lyrics were written by Nattefrost at Kvarforth’s request. Nattefrost later forgot that he had written these words for Shining and used the lyrics in another track on his second solo album, Terrorist.