Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg

Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg: 

Handling the Undead is John Ajvide Lindqvist's second novel after the great, and marvelously adapted for Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2004). The first time around, Lindqvist looked at vampires with a fresh perspective. This time around it's zombies to not quite the same level of excellence as Let the Right One In. There's no shame in failing to match the earlier novel -- Let the Right One In is a truly great horror novel.

Handling the Undead presents zombies in a new light. All the recently dead in a specific part of Stockholm at a specific time one day come back to life. This is not a zombie apocalypse. There are perhaps 1500 of them, and they don't try to eat the living. They just try to get home if they can. Those that are buried have a hard time of this until the authorities figure out the parameters of the Resurrection and dig up those graves that should have the living dead in them.

The novel does concern itself with Why and How this event has happened. But it's more focused on three families handling their undead. 

Father David and son Magnus must deal with the return of the horribly disfigured Eva. She's David's wife and Magnus' mother, and she died in a car crash that occured almost simultaneously with the Resurrection. Of all the undead, Eva is the most intelligent and able to answer question, albeit vaguely.

Grandmother Elvy and granddaughter Flora have to deal with Elvy's undead husband who died a few days before the Resurrection after a decade of Alzheimer's. Oh, and Elvy and Flora are telepathic. And Elvy believes a mysterious spirit has told her that the Biblical Apocalypse is about to happen.

Reporter and grieving grandfather Mahler and his daughter Anna have to deal with the return of Anna's two-months-dead son Elias, who died soon after his sixth birthday from a fall from a window.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff happens in Sweden. Or at least Stockholm. The authorities round the dead up. Weird psychic phenomena start to happen. The undead that are extremely decayed cease to function. Is the Apocalypse at hand? And are these zombies ever going to eat someone?

Well, read it and see, I guess. Handling the Undead is a much shorter, less detailed, quieter novel than Let the Right One In. Too quiet, really, and the explanation for what has happened, when it comes, is just a little too goofy to be satisfying. 

As with the fantastic revelations at the end of Lindqvist's later Harbour, those in Handling the Undead don't so much satisfy as they undermine all the suspense and world-building that has come before. Despite all the uses of a very Stephen King-like "This isn't what was really there but only what the human mind can translate," the end sputters out in a most unsatisfying way. What has come before was pretty solid, but perhaps not enough to lift Handling the Undead above a Lightly Recommended.

Under the Sea

Harbor [Manniskohamn] by John Ajvide Lindqvist (2008/Translated Marlaine Delargy 2010): On the fictional island of Domaro in the Stockholm archipelago, strange things have been happening for centuries. And all of those things have some relation to the sea that surrounds the island.

John Ajvide Lindqvist became an "overnight sensation" when the Swedish film adaptation of his terrific 2004 coming-of-age/vampire novel Let the Right One In appeared late in 2008, right around the same time as this novel appeared in Sweden. And the hype was well-deserved: Let the Right One In is a bold and inventive vampire novel that became a bold and inventive Swedish movie (and, later, a so-so American movie). 

The comparisons to Stephen King came thick and fast and just kept coming, though I think Lindqvist resembles other English-language horror writers as much if not moreso. Some of the supernatural creatures in Harbor remind me of the idiosyncratic magical beings and events in Clive Barker works, most notably The Great and Secret Show. The calculated, Sublime vagueness of the climax of the novel, in which things are explained but not to the extent that one is entirely certain what happened, made me think of similar endings in Ramsey Campbell novels that include Midnight Sun and The Long Lost. 

I realize that the King comparisons occur because a lot of mainstream reviewers have little or no experience reading horror -- King may be their only touchstone for what Lindqvist does. It's annoying, but there it is. Ignorance of a particular literary genre has never stopped a mainstream reviewer from generalizing ponderously about that same genre.

But Lindqvist is his own writer, not simply  a synthesizer of influences. Harbor isn't a great novel of horror and dark fantasy, but it kept me reading to the end of its not-inconsiderable length. That everything is constructed on the Not Without My Daughter template makes the successes of the novel even more remarkable. It even manages to make a fairly late-in-the-text revelation of False Memory Syndrome (yes, how 90's!) work dramatically, if not entirely convincingly.

In the present day of Harbor (the mid-2000's), we follow Anders, the alcoholic father whose daughter Maja disappeared without a trace near Domaro two years earlier. We also follow Anders' grandmother and her lover of 40 years, Simon, a retired magician/illusionist, both of whom live on the island. Anders' father, a deceased herring fisherman, was also born on Domaro; his mother having divorced his father and gone to live in Stockholm soon after Anders was born, Anders himself is a man of two worlds, having spent portions of every vacation on Domaro with his father. The novel stresses the liminal nature of both Anders and Simon throughout, their status as Men of Two Worlds. Make of that what you will.

Two years prior to the main narrative, Anders, his wife Cecilia, and Maja were visiting Domaro from their home in Sweden, as they often did. Maja vanished during a visit to the nearby lighthouse, leaving no clue as to her whereabouts in the snow and ice. Anders fell apart and Cecilia eventually left him. With nowhere else to go, Anders returns to Domaro to live in the house his immediate family was using as a vacation home when on Domaro, the warped structure known as The Shack. It's close to the homes of both Simon and Anders' grandmother, who have been lovers for decades but choose to live apart.

Both Anders and Simon (who wasn't born on the island and is thus considered a tourist by the residents despite his own decades-long residency) gradually begin to re-investigate Maja's disappearance. Strange things have begun to happen: the body of a year-lost resident washes up one day, dead for only 24 hours or less. People aren't acting like themselves. Anders is having nightmares about his daughter. And Simon has begun to assemble a hidden narrative from a number of odd incidents over the years involving disappearances, deaths, storms, and strange creatures.

The stories about Domaro's past are the most interesting things in Harbor, mixing documentary-style exposition with confabulation and myth and anecdote in an effective way. The present day has its problems, although I (unlike a lot of reviewers) don't think the self-pitying Anders is one of them. Instead, Simon is the weakest part of the narrative. He's a magician who does stage one important escape act on Domaro several decades before the main narrative. And he does think about the crippled current state of his limbs and joints a lot. 

But he's also got a thing in a matchbox, introduced early in Harbor, which ends up being an underdeveloped key to the resolution of the story. It's there, and if anything in the text requires a lot more exposition, it's the thing in the matchbox. Several times, it acts as an almost-literal Deus ex Machina, never moreso than during the climax. What is it, and what is the antagonist? Well, while I appreciate Lindqvist's desire to avoid the pitfalls of too much horror-draining exposition about the meanings and origins of things, he goes too far the other way. The climax raises more questions than it answers, leading to a certain amount of readerly frustration at the end of 500 pages.

The Smiths are to Lindqvist as Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band were to a young Stephen King. One of the novel's initially charming oddities lies with two characters who speak almost entirely in Smiths lyrics. This works both amusingly and poignantly for much of the novel, though by the time someone has said "Please, please, please" for the second or third time, the welcome has been worn out and the horror replaced by irritation. Strangeways, here we come, indeed.

Overall, Harbor is flawed but enjoyable, rewarding but occasionally frustrating. Like Stephen King, Lindqvist has a real talent for normative characterization in the midst of abnormal events, though I do think many reviewers overstate his status as "Sweden's Stephen King." There are a lot of other influences, and, at least this (relatively) early in the career of Lindqvist, he shows a greater interest in supernatural elements that are more personal, idiosyncratic, and self-created than what one saw in King's work prior to It, which appeared about 20 years into King's writing career. Here, we're less than a decade into Lindqvist's. Recommended.

Let Me In (aka Let the Right One In) (2004) by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Let Me In (aka Let the Right One In) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated from the original Swedish by Ebba Segerberg (2004): Well, if you're going to do a vampire love story, this would be one of the models for how to do it. 

Oskar, a bullied 12-year-old boy in a Scarborough-like suburb in Sweden in 1981, makes friends with a peculiar girl who only comes out at night and, initially, smells really horrible. The girl calls herself Eli. She's a vampire. Things good and bad begin to happen. Mostly good for Oskar and Eli, mostly bad for everybody else.

Lindqvist, who adapted his own novel for the immensely good Swedish film adaptation Let the Right One In, is well-versed in the horror genre without slavishly imitating anything. There are sly direct nods to Stephen King and James Herbert, along with allusions to H.P. Lovecraft's malign geometries, Richard Matheson's vampire classic I am Legend, and Shirley Jackson's sinister Hill House.

Like King, Lindqvist has published a first novel concerned with the traumatic effects of bullying and social ostracism on children. This is a distaff Carrie, though it also examines the effects of a vampire's presence on a small community, as did King's second published novel, Salem's Lot. The superficial resemblances are bolstered by Lindqvist's interest in the intersection of the supernatural and the mundane, and by his sympathetically drawn characters.

There's a bleakness to many sections of this novel that goes beyond anything in early King, though -- the secret origin of Eli, never shown in the movie, horrifies and repels. So too does the back-story of Eli's middle-aged companion at the beginning of the novel. Unspeakable rites glimpsed in Salem's Lot are here fully shown. Lindqvist's changes to the climax of the novel when adapting it for film are perfectly understandable -- I'm not sure what happens could be shown, or even implied, in a film meant for a wide release.

Throughout, we gain understanding and sympathy for lonely Oskar and lonely Eli and a few other characters, most notably Tommy, an apartment-mate of Oskar's who, while a tough teenager, isn't a bully, and is really Oskar's only friend when the novel starts, despite their difference in age. Oskar's enemies don't elicit much sympathy, but Lindqvist does firmly establish where their concluding, homicidal rage will come from, if it comes. There's empathy for the little monsters, but they're still monsters. Unlike Eli, they're not doing the things they do in order to eat.

Much of the engagement with the supernatural in the novel comes from either the young or the old, the latter represented by a loose-knit group of retirees and socially excluded men (and a woman) in their middle age. The liminal, the excluded, the forgotten and never-remembered, can see what's happening more clearly than the adult world and all the authorities. Eli murders decent people in order to survive. Will she be caught? Do we want her to be? Highly recommended.

Let Me Out

Let Me In, written and directed by Matt Reeves, based on the Swedish film and novel Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, starring Kodi Smit-McPhee (Owen), Chloe Moretz (Abby), Richard Jenkins (The Guardian) and Elias Koteas (Policeman) (2010): The original Swedish version of this film, Let the Right One In (they're both based on a Swedish novel) was such an unexpected delight that anything other than a totally awesome remake would suffer in comparison.

And suffer we do.

There are still moments of shock and nicely modulated characterization, but there's nothing here that feels fresh or startling the way the original did. Moreover, writer/director Reeves (Cloverfield, The Pallbearer) seems to have been infected by American Mass-Market Screenwriting Virus#1.

How so? Well, he excises all the secondary characters, at least as characters and not plot devices. He throws in a 'shock' flashforward at the beginning of the film for no apparent reason other than to get a shock into the first part of the film. He makes explicit a number of plot and character points that the original wisely left implicit. And he casts the pretty, pretty-traditional-looking Chloe Moretz (Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass) as Abby, the mysterious 12-going-on-500 vampire who befriends bullied, lonely 12-year-old Owen. Oh, and Reeves omits one whopper of a plot twist because American films don't show certain things, even if they're R-rated.

One of the odd things about the original film was that while it was set in the 1980's, nothing much was made of this -- indeed, I didn't realize it was set in early 1980's Sweden until I watched the 'Making Of' documentary on the DVD. Here, though, Reeves goes with the Hot Tub Time Machine approach to period detail, in addition to the opening title that tells us it's 1983. By the one-hour mark, you'll be unable to forget it's either the 1980's or Retro Sunday at Call the Office. Were the filmmakers hoping to recoup costs with a soundtrack album? Fuck, it's annoying!

The result isn't a mess so much as a bore. Most of the best setpieces come almost verbatim from the original. Inexplicably, Reeves sets the movie in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which apparently looks exactly like Wisconsin during the wintertime. And maybe it does, but the cognitive dissonance of having New Mexico treated like Wisconsin (or Sweden, or Manitoba) kept getting in the way of my suspension of disbelief. Really? It's that cold and snowy?

Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays Owen, gives a grave and winning performance, and Moretz does what she can with an underwritten part. This isn't really a bad film. It's just sort of there, filling time. Richard Jenkins also does what he can with his underwritten and yet overly explicit role as Abby's 'guardian', a role which Reeves apparently felt needed flashing neon lights around it so that we would 'get' the similiarities between Owen and Jenkins's character. Thank you, Matt Reeves. Your stolidly plodding command of film is hereby noted. Not recommended.