In this book, the corpses of the recently dead in Sweden become reanimated which leads to numerous legal, political and ethical issues when it comes to dealing with folks who aren’t technically alive. What kind of dilemmas would this cause society? For example, if this actually happened in Stockholm, I’m sure that that the publishers of Stieg Larsson’s books would chain his zombified ass to a desk and let him bang on the keys of a laptop until they got enough to put out a new bestseller, The Girl Who sJFnfJGgJOJ=I30&*(&U389kkl8.

Back to this book. Sweden is experiencing a weird electrical surge that leaves people unable to turn off or unplug their electronics, and it also seems to be giving everyone some wicked headaches. After a sudden intensification of the electrical field, it’s gone but in it’s wake, the recently dead in the area have awakened.

However, these aren’t the usual flesh eating zombies. These are just mindless and disgusting corpses that usually try to return to their old homes. The Swedish government tries to deal with 2000 of the walking dead as their loved ones demand answers and access to them. Is this a virus? Something supernatural? A sign of the apocalypse? No one knows, and the status of the zombies’ civil rights is up in the air since no law has ever addressed the undead before. As tensions rise, it becomes clear that the zombies are causing some kind of telepathy in the living people as well as becoming mirrors to the emotional state of those closest to them.

As both a fan of the zombie genre and Lindquvist’s previous genre-bending vampire novel Let the Right One In, I had high hopes for this one, but I was supremely disappointed. Part of my problem with this has to do with my own preferences in zombie story telling. I like my zombies to be horrific cannibals who munch brains and destroy society while survivors struggle against them and each other. Whenever anyone starts to add in telepathy or tries to make the zombies part of some larger supernatural force, my eyes glaze over. And if you’ve got a pack of zombies that are just sad remnants of the people who died that don’t even try to gnaw on the nearest person, then I’m just not that interested. (Yes, I realize I have issues.)

It seems like Lindquvist couldn’t decide if he was writing a horror novel about the nature of death, or kind of an absurd take on the idea of how society would react if people did come back from the dead. Frankly, S.G. Browne’s black comedy Breathers already dealt with a lot of these ideas, and Browne did it better. The focus keeps wandering as Lindqvist tries to add in some horror elements late in the game, and the ending was a mess.

It’s still well-written and Lindquvist is a writer who realizes that people are the ultimate monsters, but I would have liked to have seen what kind of twist he could have put on the classic zombie genre of the undead destroying society rather than society trying to figure out how to deal with some mostly harmless walking corpses.