Devouring Books: Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

"He had never heard anything like it before. You don't cry like this. You're not allowed to cry like this. You die if you cry like this."

I've been meaning to read Let The Right One In for a couple of years now, but I somehow just never got round to it. It's weird, because it's something my friend Christina is always telling me to read, and it involves Sweden and vampires, and the combination of those two things always ends up being my favourite thing:

But yeah, somehow this just ended up staying on the shelf (or, more accurately, in the bottom of my wardrobe) for a while. But now it has been read, and all the world did rejoice!

So. Eric Northman does not appear in this book. I know. I KNOW. What is the point of even being Swedish and writing about vampires, if the greatest Swedish vampire of all isn't included? It's just like... Whatever. 

I'm going to start again. 

So, Let the Right One In is a vampire novel, but also it's a really novel vampire novel- I feel like I've said before how much I enjoy it when authors add new things to the vampire canon (like, artificial blood substitute drinks, and having a soul makes you good, and, well, being super emo about being a vampire...) and Let The Right One In does that in a number of different ways that I don't really want to tell you about because, hey, you want to discover them for yourself, don't you? You surely do! Although, let's just say that saving someone you love after they've been bitten? Maybe not the best thing you can do.

There are a LOT of different characters in Let The Right One In, a lot of things going on at once, and it's not always clear who you're supposed to be rooting for; or how everyone fits into the bigger picture. This is both a blessing and a... non-good thing, in that, hey, I don't really want to be told who to root for, and I don't even know if I'm sure now if what happened should have happened, and I like that. But then there are a lot of characters introduced who seem like they're going to be important and then turn out not to be (I'm thinking specifically of Tommy right now) or, it's not even that they're not important, but that their stories just aren't properly ended, which kind of bugs me. The fact that I want to know about what happened to them? The mark of a good book.

I read this over two weeks, because of reasons, and I would recommend NOT doing that if you want to read it. I mean, it was still a good read, but I'd kind of forgotten details and who was friends with who, and there's a kid called Tomas and one called Tommy and that got confusing, and I'd just say... aim to read it in less time. Which is probably good advice for any book, but still. The fact that the movie(s) have been such a big thing is kind of annoying too, because the word vampire doesn't appear in this book until the middle. And even though you can kind of guess what's going on before that, it would still be a lot more effective, atmosphere-wise, if you didn't know at all that it was about vampires (the blurb DOES NOT help, either). But I guess that's the price you pay for something having become popular and you having not read it for ages after you got it. Hmph.

Now, since this was my very last RIP read of the year (my tenth, I might add. Wow.) I should probably ask myself the question 'Do I feel lucky?' I mean 'Was this book scary?' and you know what... Yeah. It was. Kind of. I mean, it wasn't so scary that I couldn't sleep, or that I couldn't read it before bedtime, but it was definitely gory enough, and creepy, and also at one point this guy shits his pants with fear, which is both disgusting and... Understandable, in his circumstances. I'd say it's maybe more thriller-y than horror, but it's hard to define in any way because it really has everything- Paedophilia, vampires, murders, blood, bullying, hospitals, glue sniffing, alcoholics, useless parents, and even, in the strangest of places, love.

I'll bet you never knew Sweden was so dark.