"THE CROW GIRL" - a Swedish thriller written by Erik Axl Sund - begins with a body discovered in some bushes, the mummified remains of a boy who has been horribly abused, his skin split with wounds and colored with bruises, his genitals excised. It's certainly an attention-grabbing gambit, but the novel is less concerned with whodunit than why. Jeanette Kihlberg is on the case. She's a detective with the Stockholm police, overworked, underpaid and at odds with her sexist colleagues. Things aren't going so well at home either. She has to bum money off her father to pay the bills because her husband spends his days in his studio, chasing his dream as a painter. "Boredom was all they had in common these days," Sund writes, and in Neil Smith's unobtrusive translation their voices take on a serrated edge whenever they speak to each other. Though Jeanette plays on a soccer team, she can never manage to make it to any of her son's matches. It's a "gray, everyday life" until one body is followed by another, and then another, all of them immigrant boys, and the investigation consumes her. The braided novel also tracks the story of Sofia Zetterlund, a psychologist who specializes in childhood trauma. She is a seeming ally and even a romantic interest of Jeanette - but the reader figures out very early on that she is in fact the serial killer and the Crow Girl of the title. The deadly tension of their friendship has real potential, except that Sofia is characterized with soap opera clumsiness. She suffers from multiple personality disorder. So while Sofia Zetterlund is a psychologist with a successful practice and a spacious five-room apartment, she is also Victoria Bergman, a serial killer with a sex dungeon/torture chamber built behind a bookcase in her living room. In the elevated reality of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," I can buy into a plot device like this, but here I found it cartoonishly unbelievable, offset by the novel's otherwise grim earnestness. And good lord is it grim. Especially when we come to understand why Sofia/Victoria kills. As a child she was endlessly abused. By her pedophilic father. And many others, including some of his friends and colleagues. "The Crow Girl" takes us back in time, staggering flashbacks throughout the novel, and we come to understand that Victoria is a monster because she is the product of monsters. I'm a callused reader. There's not much that bothers me. But I felt exhaustedly repulsed by "The Crow Girl." The graphic depictions of sexual violence - much of it directed at children - kept piling up until I had to go for a run in the sun or race to the multiplex to watch "Finding Dory," anything to dilute the nastiness. That's not much of an endorsement, I know. Unless you love reading about creepy pedophiles and extreme violence. If so, then have I got the book for you. It's no surprise "The Crow Girl" seems to model itself on the granddaddy of the Swedish crime fiction phenomenon: Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Sund - who is actually a team of two writers, Jerker Eriksson and Hakan Axlander Sundquist - shines a light on pedophilia and human trafficking and child abuse the same way Larsson showcased the victimization of women. There's something incendiary about these novels: They want the reader to feel repelled by the pestilence they're exposing, which merits some applause. But Larsson gives us hope. He successfully transforms Lisbeth Salander from victim to conqueror. We see her suffer, and we empathize with her and root for her revenge. That's why "The Crow Girl" works best in its second half, when Victoria Bergman begins to hunt down a secret ring of pedophiles made up of the Swedish 1 percent. She takes vengeance for their abuse of her and prevents them from harming more children. Fine! Great! I could go along with her trapping her sicko father in his basement sauna and burning down the house. I could even be O.K. with her surgically dismembering a pedophilic businessman and using his blood to roller paint a room - if I hadn't had to endure several hundred pages of her pliering the teeth out of kids, beating them with electrical cables, hitting them in the eyes with a hammer, drugging them, molesting them, mummifying them, hanging them and - here's the part I never could figure out - depositing them in a public place where she could easily be caught. If only revenge were the focus of the novel, it would have mercifully lost a few hundred pages and made our central character less repulsive. Salander's a hero I want to read about. Victoria's a freak I wish I could forget. If you're not convinced, let me tell you about Gao Lian of Wuhan, another immigrant boy Victoria victimizes. But she's got a soft spot for little Gao. He lives in the secret room behind the bookshelf, and she trains him into a kind of torture-porn warrior who attacks the kidnapping victims she brings home. When he's not hammering the brains out of some poor kid's skull while she's in the next room drinking chardonnay with a friend, he's crayoning pictures and riding a stationary bike. At one point he sneaks out and wanders thoughtfully around Stockholm, taking in the sights, enjoying the musical way in which the Swedes speak, before dutifully returning to his sex dungeon, an infraction Victoria seems pretty chill about given that he could put her whole secret serial killer thing at risk. Since "The Crow Girl" is marketed as a blockbuster - with an initial print run of 100,000 copies - I think it's only fair to make pop-culture comparisons. I'm not the first to say that superhero stories are the western of this era: the dominant narrative, a cultural barometer, a billboard for American values and anxieties. And this novel is the literary equivalent of the disappointment that was "Batman v Superman." Excessively grim, dour and plodding. The last gasp of post-9/11 cynicism. I love the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, but they are the product of another time. We've struggled through too much bad news for too long - and lately the ticket sales and critical reception indicate people are ready for hope and optimism. The chipper, winky, smartass Avengers over the sad, exhausted, gloomy Batman. Even the hard-R "Deadpool" was at its heart a cheery love story. This is a very American point of view, and I should note that "The Crow Girl" was an international best seller. So I could be wrong about its stateside reception. But its unrelenting pain just doesn't strike me as what people are looking for in their entertainment right now. I'm no Pollyanna. My writing and reading habits trend toward the monstrous. Take "A Little Life," by Hanya Yanagihara - a best seller, a National Book Award finalist and one of my favorite books of 2015. It was also a celebrated novel that reveled in darkness. But "A Little Life" was buoyed by humor and love and deeply felt friendship. Reading that book changed me for the better, whereas "The Crow Girl" made me want to wash my eyes out with bleach before leaping off the nearest skyscraper. "You're somehow supposed to enjoy the misery," a police officer thinks partway through the novel, nominally in reference to Sweden's weather. It might be the most telling line from "The Crow Girl," and it would double nicely as a warning label on the cover. BENJAMIN PERCY'S newest book, "Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction," will be published this fall A victim turned killer hunts down a pedophile ring made up of the Swedish 1 percent.