Queens is the setting where New York City’s everyday streets meet a wilderness that conceals a long history of abandonment and danger. For Apollo Kagwa, the borough is at first a route through snow, crowds, and residential blocks; at its forested edge, it becomes an unfamiliar landscape in which he searches for Emma Valentine and encounters the consequences of the Knudsen family’s pact with a troll.

Urban Setting and Geographic Contrasts

The novel identifies Forest Hills as the neighborhood containing New York City’s only forest. Apollo arrives at Forest Hills–71st Avenue station during a snowfall, struggling to hold his suitcase as rush-hour crowds pour up the stairs behind him. The weather and the crush of commuters make the station entrance an inhospitable threshold: he cannot pause to recover his strength without being pushed along. Nearby, a family loading children into a cab sharpens his sense of isolation, as he envies the ordinary family scene while carrying the uncertainty of whether Emma and their son Brian are alive.

The borough’s urban geography changes markedly as Apollo follows an older man through the evening. Their route passes named residential streets and crosses Metropolitan Avenue, where brick facades give way to detached houses and aluminum siding. Beyond Union Turnpike, single-family homes, aging cars, gas stations, and corner stores lead toward the Northern Forest, at the northeastern edge of Forest Park. The forest covers more than five hundred acres within Queens. The change is not a departure from the borough so much as a sudden change of scale and atmosphere: the city’s familiar blocks give way to a substantial tract of woodland.

Forest Park and the Search for Emma

The forest’s density makes it possible for Apollo to lose his sense of the surrounding city. In its thickest parts, he can forget that he is inside one of the most densely populated cities on the planet; the woodland seems to belong to a much older time. Yet public landmarks remain within it. The next morning Apollo searches near the Carousel and the George Seuffert, Sr., Bandshell, places that might offer shelter from the weather. He walks until midday without finding Emma, unable to know whether she is far away or only a few dozen trees from him.

The weather shapes this search without making the forest impassable. Snow has fallen but not remained; the park is overcast, damp, and heavy with wet ground and drooping branches. A concrete road winds through its middle, darkened by the rain. When Apollo finally leaves the forest, he turns toward 86th Road, having to abandon the search there and continue it in the surrounding neighborhood. Forest Park thus gives the pursuit a distinct geography: Emma may be close enough to be hidden by a small stretch of trees, while Apollo’s inability to locate her forces him back into the streets.

Little Norway and the Knudsen House

The residential area known as Little Norway offers no dramatic visual difference from other parts of the borough. Apollo finds one-family homes, parked sedans and minivans, small front lawns behind chain-link fences, and window coverings that conceal the interiors. The name suggests a distinct enclave, but the streets appear to him broadly interchangeable with neighborhoods named for other immigrant communities. This ordinary exterior matters when he reaches the address Patrice Green supplied: the three-story house is among the block’s largest and oldest, but its yellowed blinds obscure its rooms, and no one answers the door.

The hidden history of the house and forest is disclosed through Jorgen Knudsen’s account of his ancestors. According to Jorgen, Nils Knudsen left Norway with his wife, Anna Sofie, and made an agreement that involved bringing a troll with him as insurance for the family’s passage. The Sloopers traveled to New York and continued upstate, while Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter remained in Queens. At that time, Jorgen explains, the area was farmland surrounded by thousands of acres of forest and green space. He presents the landscape as suitable for a creature associated in its homeland with forests and mountains, and describes the borough’s many secluded pockets and caves as places where something large could remain hidden.

Park Development and Concealed History

Jorgen places the transformation of this landscape within a longer history of urban development. By 1898, land for the park had been purchased and its design was underway, with golf courses and hiking paths among the planned features. The development made the woodland a public park, but, in Jorgen’s account, it did not eliminate the hills and caves that could shelter the troll. Queens therefore holds two landscapes at once: a designed recreational space, crossed by roads and marked by public attractions, and a less visible terrain of recesses that the park’s surface cannot fully disclose.

The cave-bound history is also one of successive children put at risk. Jorgen says that Nils was charged with appeasing the troll and eventually took his daughter Agnes into the woods. He later claims that Nils did not repeat this act with the seven children he had with Petra, while the portraits in Jorgen’s house reveal a much longer record of infant victims. Jorgen describes searching for vulnerable children himself, first by driving around Queens in a white van in the 1980s, and later by using the internet to identify candidates. The contrast between the borough’s ordinary streets and this concealed history makes the location central to the novel’s tension: danger is not situated in a remote wilderness, but within a familiar urban landscape whose wooded spaces conceal what its residents cannot readily see.