John Ajvide Lindqvist

Lindqvist is one of my favorite writers of all time. He has a way of writing horror stories that are slowly disturbing you as you read more, and are more horrific thinking back on it than when you are reading it. I also think he shows the human side of everything very well in his stories.
This is a story about a failed artist couple. The man finds a baby in the woods, and while she is completely silent, she can sing or hum perfect notes. She grows up as a strange little girl. Very quiet, and show more without much understanding of the real world. This is because of her strange upbringing and because of who she is. The first part of the book is about her growing up, and the people around her discovering her true character. The second part shows how she connects to other young girls looking for something in life. The last part shows the terrible but inevitable conclusion of the story.
This story is truly disturbing, mostly because the girls are not that abnormal. This isn't about supernatural monsters, but the monsters in us all. The written horrific events (trying not to spoil here) I found very disgusting, but they need to be there. Five out of five stars, and Lindqvist remains high on my list. show less

Horror di classe, "Lasciami Entrare" è sicuramente uno dei romanzi più duri e tristi che mi sia mai capitato di leggere. C'è una vampira dall'aspetto di una ragazzina dodicenne, c'è un suo coetaneo umano e, forse, c'è anche amore tra di loro, ma scordatevi le stronzatine neogotiche in stile twilight: quella roba è buona per teenager americani cerebrolesi. La materia che dà corpo al libro di Lindqvist, invece, è la vita, quella vera, grigia, squallida e dura che vediamo nelle show more periferie delle nostre città, e anche la sua controparte vampiresca non le è da meno. Niente fascino tenebroso, solo una sete inestinguibile che porta chi è affetto dall'infezione vampirica sempre sull'orlo di un'orribile morte per denutrizione e lo costringe ad uccidere per sopravvivere...
Un romanzo duro che, nonostante l'argomento di matrice fantastica, riesce ad essere reale e sincero, ma siete avvertiti: dopo la lettura sarà difficile scrollarvi di dosso il profondo pessimismo con cui l'autore delinea una realtà dalla qual si può solo scappare per essere felici.... show less

"Let the Right One In" seems to have come out at about the same time that Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series was in the process of taking over the entire planet, but while it, too, puts vampires in a modern setting, it's important, I think, to highlight the differences between the two books. First of all, it's not a classic, but it's not, you know, Twilight. And while the book's basic premise might not have been revolutionary by the time the mid-aughts rolled around, it adds some show more interesting -- and quite frankly, daring -- twists to he usual gory bloodsucking procedures. It provides some interesting medical musings about the condition -- if that's what it is -- of vampirism. Lindqvist takes great care to describe the physiological changes that take place when a normal human being becomes a vampire, and much of the book is set in antiseptic hospital waiting rooms as doctors try to figure out just what they've got on their hands. More interestingly still, while vampires have always been portrayed as seductive, "Let the Right One In" takes this trope into some seriously dark and disturbing territory that I can't even hint at on a family book-cataloguing site. That alone means that this one may not be for everyone.

Lindqvist, quite honestly, doesn't really come off as a literary star in this translation: the book's prose isn't elegant, and it sometimes feels about twice as long as it should be. But he seems genuinely interested in the question of evil: Oskar, the boy at the center of the tale, is the victim of bullies, but that doesn't mean he's exactly an innocent. Neither, quite frankly, are the shiftless half-drunks that populate many of this novel's other pages. The author always leaves the question of Oskar complicity with evil open in regards to his relationship with the book's vampire protagonist. He doesn't drain people's blood to survive, but it's made pretty clear that his anger at being the target of bullying make this possibility at least sort of palatable to him. This probably isn't an accident Though the novel set in eminently civilized early-eighties Sweden, which features Walkmans, Rubik's cubes, and awful hair metal bands, there's a persistent "return of the repressed" theme running through the book. "Twilight" may have put vampires in rural Washington state, but "Let the Right One In" puts the smack dab in the middle of the best-running, best-planned, and most boring societies the world has ever seen. But there's danger about: sadistic bullies and bloodthirsty vampires roam the suburbs of Stockholm. It's an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least. It may keep many readers going right up to the book's last pages. show less

Admittedly, it took me a few pages to get into Let Me In. Once I fell in love with Oskar and Eli I couldn't get enough of their story. Being a twelve year old sensitive boy, Oskar is the subject of daily bullying at school. He dreams of murderous revenge far beyond his sad and lonely years. At night he takes a hunting knife into the woods and repeatedly stabs trees, imagining the soft and penetrable flesh of his school yard enemies. Meanwhile, Eli is a mystery. With a strange way of speaking show more and no history to speak of, Eli fascinates Oskar to the point of obsession. He finds himself in love with a strange girl who only comes out at night, repeatedly says she neither a girl nor boy, and can solve puzzles she has never seen before in the blink of an eye. Who is she? Then the murders begin. Gruesome and strange, victims are drained of blood. Is Eli to blame?
A running theme through Let Me In is the absence of father figures. Eli has a fake father. Tommy has a fake step-father. Oskar's dad has divorced his mom and is living an alcohol-soaked life outside of town. I wanted to pay attention to the mothers for I hoped they would be the unspoken heroes of Let Me In.
Not so much.
As an aside, I appreciated the literary references of Plato, Dante, Pyramus, Thisbe, and King Minos. show less