I finally got my revenge on Sweden. For most of my life I’ve been bombarded with newspapers and radio telling me how Sweden is so much much very much absolutely completely better than Britain at practically everything. Here’s some random quotes from the BBC news archive :

“Sweden has probably the strongest freedom of information law anywhere in the world.”

“Sweden has one of the best staffed health services in the world. But as a parent, Sweden seems the perfect place to have children.”

“BBC's Joe More...

You know that bit at the beginning of Amadeus, where Salieri has composed this very uninspired little march, which he and the Emperor play for Mozart? Then Mozart sits down at the keyboard and says, hm, that's not quite right, is it? And he messes around with it for a couple of minutes, until he's suddenly transformed it into "Here's farewell to the games with the girls" from The Marriage of Figaro.

Well, it's like that Låt den rätte komma in and Twilight. John Ajvide Lindqvist has looked at Ste More...

Imagine for a moment that you were at an event, like the 1995 Rugby World cup where South Africa both hosted and won. Imagine being there in the heat of that moment - the cheer and ebulation. That light, almost unreal sense that the world has faded away and there is only that moment. Nothing else is important and you want to quietly capture the complete bliss you are experiencing and put it in a bottle somewhere. Hopefully at some future date you can take it out and rekindle those emotions and b More...

Yo, lesson for you, Stephenie: this is how you write a fucking vampire novel.

So you can run and tell THAT.

Soiled…soiled and a bit emotionally off-kilter.

That’s the best I can do to describe how this book made me feel. It’s dark, morose and...really…really...REALLY…creepy. Not strange sounds and creaking doors creepy. Creepylike that "overly affectionate" uncle who stares at you too often and always wants a hug that lasts for an inappropriate length of time. That kind of creepy.

This book oozes it.

The working class Swedish suburb where the story takes place feels dingy, depressing and rundown. The peo More...

As seen on The Readventurer

I can't even find the words to describe how much I LOVED this novel. But let me start by warning Twilight lovers that this book is not about sexy sparkly vampires and teenage love. If you are not ready to read about ugly realities of human life, do not open this book.

It is not an easy book to read. The story is complex and involves many characters, whose presence sometimes is just momentary. The action moves from one character to another very quickly. But once you und More...

Terrifying, engrossing and a book that encompasses many different topics. Not just a story about vampires; this book takes on such issues as bullying, revenge, pedophilia, prostitution, drug use, alcoholism and the sheer desperation of loneliness. Beautifully written and terribly disturbing. This book sets the bar for the genre.

After watching the Swedish movie this book is based on, I thought it was an intensely creepy film and promptly got the book to check out the full story. I figured that the planned American film version would be a pale shadow of the original because there’s no way that a Hollywood movie studio is going to show that messed up tale in it’s original form to audiences in the U.S. Little did I know that even the Swedish producers didn’t have the collective nutsack to give us the full story on how godd More...

I wasn't quite sure I wanted to write an actual review/reflection about this novel. I didn't "learn" anything from this book (except maybe how not to troll for victims of my or my master's vampiric lusts?), and other reviewers here (and elsewhere) have adequately summarized the story for the interested. But in light of the flood of vampire-themed schlock we've been enduring the last few years...

For those who care - Read this novel. It's very good. It's an example of what a vampire novel can and More...

It's bumming me out. 50 pages in and I'm giving up. I don't think I can take this much gore any longer. It's disturbing. I need at least one likable character - someone to root for, only then I can take in gore, serial murderers, pedophilia and such. Without somebody to identify with, suffering through one violent description after another is no fun. This was no fun.

And now I'm fighting this urge: I want to crawl in under the table, wrap myself up in a blanket, stuck a thumb into my mouth and r More...

*This book is now in paperback under the title Let the Right One In*

The story of Oskar, a 12 year-old boy living in a suburb of Stockholm, who is bullied mercilessly at school, has divorced parents, an alcoholic dad, suffers bouts of incontinence, shoplifts for fun, and keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings dealing with murder. Needless to say, for one so young, Oskar has plenty of problems, but no one to talk to.

Life becomes a bit more exciting when a strange murder occurs two subway stops f More...

Wow...while I don't read much "horror"....I thought this was a great story! I'd be lying if I didn't say some parts were disturbing and some were downright disgusting, but there was so much more to this book than that. While there wasn't a cast of warm and fuzzy characters...I felt for many of them. I can't think of a word bad enough to describe Hakan that would truly fit him....monster for sure...the scenes with him were the hardest to take. Oskar, Eli, Tommy, Virginia....these were all charact More...

Having seen the film before reading the novel, I'm less impressed than I might have been had the experiences been reversed. I was engaged throughout, but compared to Lindqvist's screenplay, the novel felt bloated and overtly prurient (while Tomas Alfredson's film was more atmospheric, nuanced, erotic, morally ambiguous, and mesmerizing). Every episode cut from the novel during the adaptation process was absolutely necessary; and a character central to the novel (Haken) was whittled down to just More...

Dear Stephenie,

This is how you write a book.

Sincerely,

The World

This is a werid, very strange book. Really strange, totally strange.

But it worked for me.

Lindqvist tells the story of Oskar and his friend Eli, who just happens to be a vampire stuck into a 12 year old body, you know like that girl in Anne Rice's books. (I never liked Rice for some reason).

And then people start dying, the blood drained from thier body.

And then other people see something they shouldn't.

And Oskar is bullied, but gets a pair, loses them, and gets them back because now he is has a f More...

I discovered this story when I discovered the movie. I enjoyed the film so much I wanted to know more. "Let the Right One In" is in some ways unrelentingly grim. There a lot of horrifying things in it that have absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural, especially if you stop to really thing about them. The horror itself is good too. I've read tons of vampire fiction and find this to be a truly refreshing take on the genre. In terms of the characters, I thought both Oskar and Eli were very More...

Call this one "The Anti-Twilight." They had me at "the Swedish Stephen King." Um, not so much.

Easily the most *interesting* read in a long time. 4 stars instead of 5, or 3, because the story--just the pure story? Meh. In itself, only just compelling enough to keep me reading. But the characters--OH, the characters. I ached for every one of them. For a classic co-dependent like me, looking into the lonely, heartache-ridden lives in this book is pure agony...although most of the characters are hop More...

April 2010

Why it's difficult to review this book:

1) Everyone else has already called it the anti-Twilight.
2) The rating system doesn't really have a spot for "OH MY GOD, KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!"

That said, it's a great vampire story. Just bleak. And draining. Kinda like an actual vampire. Hey, I see what Lindqvist did there...

I can't stop thinking about the characters. Most of them weren't likable but I ended up caring for them anyway. In the way you care about your family even if they're screwed up and do really bad things. This book is gruesome, horrifying, sweet and tender. how strange.

I had expectations on this book, since I got it as a homework and my teacher was all excited over it. I didn't really expect it to be so unusual though, and with unusual I mean diffrent from it's genre. It's stamped as a vampire/terror book and when you hear that you often think about dark alleys, poles, vampire hunters and so on but this is totally different. First of all it takes place in a swedish suburb in the 80's and the main character (Oscar) is a normal swedish boy who gets bullied. Then More...

I read an interview with Stephenie Meyer, writer of the "Twilight" series, where she said something about how she had taken liberties with the classic vampire story because she was writing fiction and there are no hard-fast rules about what vampires can or cannot do. So she did things like make their skin glimmer in the sunlight.

This is a laughable about of liberty -- not to mention creativity -- considering what John Ajvide Lindqvist has done with the vampire of his novel "Let The Right One In More...

Let me preface my 3-star rating by saying that if this were the type of book I generally read, this would no doubt be 5 stars. As it is not, consider my 3-stars as the highest rating I can give this novel. By any account, this is a masterpiece of it's genre.

Let the Right One In is not for the squeamish. Not for the easily despressed. Definitely not for the teen looking for the next "Twilight". This is not your mother's "Dracula".

This novel is relentlessly dark. Its characters are broken and wast More...

Blackberg, periferia di Stoccolma. Oskar è un efebico ragazzino vessato dai suoi compagni. Ha delle fantasie omicide e un coltello in tasca che non ha il coraggio di usare. Una sera incontra Eli, una graziosa e misteriosa ragazzina, che abita nel suo condominio. I due divengono amici, a dispetto del fatto che lei si fa vedere solo di sera. I loro scambi di parole sono brevi, a volte secchi e concisi. Ma continuano a vedersi. Intanto nel quartiere dove entrambi abitano, cominciano a sparire delle More...

Let the Right One In reads like a response to both YA and the idealized visions adults carry of children. Both are incomplete and radically errant, and while unrealism can be quite useful for creating original thought, these visions are dogmatically consistent across books and believers. Lindqvist’s children are intensely curious and capricious, sadistic towards each other out of little more than entertainment or entitlement. But it runs deeper than how conflict is handled – it lies in little Os More...

I'm trying to figure out how best to talk about this one. I started reading Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist for a book group with my girlfriends. I did not choose this one, however, I have been looking forward to it for a while. It's supposed to be the scariest, best Vampire tale. Ever. Period. End of story.

For the record, it's terrifying. So much so that I couldn't read it at night. It freaked me out too much. That said, it's not the vampire parts of the book that I found disturbi More...

For the most part, this book was beautiful. It was a horror story but had just enough shards of hope in it to strike a chord with me. It was much more than a vampire story; at its core, it was the story of two lost, lonely individuals who find happiness with each other, no matter the cost. It also explored what one will go through for love (Hakan) and the fragility of the human spirit (Lacke).

One of favorite techniques that authors use is when they run multiple story lines together. I loved how More...