I liked this book very much. It takes the familiar tale of the “Zombie-ocalypse” and turns it into something very different- more akin to The Seventh Seal than to Night of the Living Dead. I see Handling the Undead as a study in how people handle death. The dead have risen from the grave to confront us with death. What does death mean for the living? What is the meaning of death itself? These are the disquieting questions explored in Handling the Undead and these are some of the answers I took from the novel. Feel free to add your own if you want. I have mine listed here, Kübler-Ross style.
Fear
Dead people are scary. There are always exceptions, but for most of us dead people are horrifying because they are dead. We see ourselves in the dead and that revelation can be a very unpleasant experience. The dead are a shocking, undeniable reminder that we are all going to die. No exceptions. It is easy to see where the visceral horror of Night of the Living Dead comes from. The dead rise up out of their graves to devour us, just like death will devour us all sooner or later. Lindqvist returns to these zombie tropes at the end when the dead rush the gates at the Heath, or when the drowned man terrorizes Anna and Gustav. This is zombie story and certain things are expected I guess.
More effective, and thoughtful, is the exploration of the roots of this fear. Flora’s observes that her ten year old brother is greatly disturbed, not only from watching George Romero, but also from the death of his grandfather Tore. “People can disappear.” The character in the novel that most unsettled me was Gustav Mahler with his ever present fears about heart disease. Thinking back on it, Gustav spends most of the novel trying to dodge death until finally he is undone by his own disgust. In this zombie story the dead are also mirrors or "prisms" of our own emotions. The dead act out how we feel about death. Magnus tearfully concludes that it was really he who killed Balthazar, because of the anger he felt towards his mother.
Loss
Death takes the people we love away from us. It is that simple. Gustav and Anna are overwhelmed with grief at the loss of Elias and live surrounded by the memories of the dead child. The story of how Elias returns to them, half rotten from the grave, makes for some very sad reading. Likewise, David and Magnus have to deal with the loss of Eva. I thought the scenes where the child Magnus tries to come to terms with what has happened to his mother to be especially touching, as are the goodbye scenes that close out the novel. I always feel awkward saying goodbye to people, and I feel even more awkward saying goodbye to people that I really care about. When people die we almost never get to say goodbye even when we get the opportunity. Wakes and funerals don’t count because the departed are just that: departed.
Hope
Hope takes two forms in Handling the Undead. One is hope for Apocalypse in this world, the other is the hope for life in the world to come. These two forms of hope are represented by Elvy and Flora, our shamans for the story who explain what is going on.
Apocalypse turns out to be a dead end for both Elvy and Flora. Elvy is dismayed to find that, despite the miraculous resurrection of the dead, the Christian version of the end times is simply not going to happen and in fact she is confused by her vision of the Blessed Mother who turns out to be the Angel of Death instead. Flora likewise is disheartened to find that the human order of things continues unaltered on its own familiar rotten paths. No revolution for you Flora. Flora, the disaffected outsider, is a character that appears in all four of John Lindqvist’s novels so I will save comments about that subject for a different post.
Handling the Undead also presents us with the hope for a life beyond this life, the hope of a life in the world to come. If the souls of the dead can return to claim their bodies- there must be life beyond the death of the body. “For me” asserts Elvy, “it is completely obvious that a person has a soul.” This soul can live beyond the body which is merely “a sack of meat.” Flora debates this idea with Elvy, but being a kindred shaman, she eventually sees the souls of the dead herself and understands what is going on, even before Elvy.
Death literally makes an appearance in Handling the Undead, and when death does appear she is a figure of terror, of mystery, but also of hope. Eva’s drawing of herself and “The Fisher” (an unmistakable Christian image) shows the drowning child Eva with a smile on her face. Death comes to claim the souls of the dead, not to destroy the bodies of the living. Death, in this very optimistic view of life, is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something else.
There is a place where happiness exists. A place, and a time.