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.
The Neon Demon (2016): written by Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, and Polly Stenham; directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; starring Elle Fanning (Jesse), Karl Glusman (Dean), Jena Malone (Ruby), Bella Heathcote (Gigi), Abbey Lee (Sarah), and Keanu Reeves (Hank): Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn works in the lurid pulp mode of Only God Forgives here, and not in the cooler style of his break-out film, Drive.
The subject matter combined with the carefully composed, static shots and cool synth score suggest late-career Stanley Kubrick directing a very special episode of Melrose Place. The plot manages to surprise. The characters are barely characters, but as this is a horror movie centered on the cosmic terror of the modelling industry, one expects a keen devotion to surface. And a horror movie it is, not so much slowly building as suddenly exploding in the last half hour.
The men are peripheral to the action, while the women take center stage. Elle Fanning performs beautifully as the enigmatic new model at the heart of the story, while Jena Malone and Abbey Lee embody different, dark aspects of the modelling industry. Not for the squeamish. Recommended.
Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon (1984): There's more than a whiff of the Southern Gothic about the writing of McCammon (an Alabama native). It doesn't come out in his prose, which has remained sturdy and serviceable throughout his career, but in the plots and characters, which can sometimes jostle with one another in odd, baroque ways. There's about three novels' worth of plot and characters in Usher's Passing. It's about half-a-novel too much, but I was never bored.
After a prologue that establishes Edgar Allan Poe as having based "The Fall of the House of Usher" on a real American family of arms dealers, the novel leaps to the (then) present day of 1984. The patriarch of the Usher family is dying of a peculiar, terrible ailment that only Ushers get. Two of the three heirs are jostling for position, while the third, horror novelist Rix, really just wants to be left alone as he mourns the recent suicide of his wife.
But Rix will come home to Usherland, the Usher family complex that somehow keeps the Ushers unnaturally young-looking so long as they live on its grounds.
Once home, Rix begins to work on a secret history of the Ushers in the hopes that such a book about the immensely secretive clan will jumpstart his faltering writing career. Meanwhile, in the poverty-wracked homes that surround Usherland, a boy searches for his stolen brother. A mythical being called the Pumpkin Man has supposedly been stealing children from the countryside surrounding Usherland for generations. A mythical, giant snake-panther hybrid called Greediguts has been terrorizing the woods for just about as long. A mysterious old man with what appear to be magical powers lives in the ruins of a devastated, forgotten town whose crumbled walls are branded with Hiroshima shadows, at the top of the area's highest hill.
Something lurks inside the original, now-abandoned, gigantic, Winchester-House-like Usher mansion -- abandoned decades ago but still dominating the landscape. Sometimes people who go into the mansion never come out. There are stories of strange earthquakes, comets falling on the mountains, people possessed of magical powers. The fate of the Usher patriarch is always terrible. And the current Usher patriarch is secretively creating a new, devastating weapons system for the U.S. government.
And that's the set-up. Mostly. There are a couple of other subplots that ultimately feed back into the main narrative. McCammon gives us a wealth of creepy historical incident and a number of sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, most prominently Rix and the boy searching for his brother. It all fits together nicely, this story of Gothic horror and nuclear terror and family secrets. Recommended.
