Other works with similar themes? (spoilers)

[lombano]

I thought a bit of compare-and-contrast of LS and works with comparable themes might be interesting. Two spring to my mind:

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing - The titular fifth child, with mild speech impairment, exceptional strength and wholly psychopathic behaviour is a monster with some similarities with Theres. Though his abnormality is obvious to all, because there is no obvious diagnosis and he's not severely impaired, the authorities refuse to recognise there's anything wrong. The family is ultimately wrecked by him. I actually find Theres more sympathetic than the Fifth Child, because she in her very warped way at least seems to care about her fellow teenage girls and about Jerry, but the Fifth Child is entirely psychopathic, even though much less murderous than Theres.

El Castillo de la Pureza (The Castle of Purity) directed by Arturo Ripstein - Now, I've not actually watched this, but I understand it's about a family kept in complete seclusion by the father, so that the kids are raised a la Theres - but unlike LS the seclusion is on the grounds of the outside world being morally unclean rather than hostile and dangerous.

[EEA]

The only book that I could think of is called The God of Small Things. In it a whole family is destroyed by the incidents that happened to them. The sister and brother reminded me of Theres and Teresa who like them are also trying to find a place were they can be accepted.

[gattoparde59]

In general, parts of this reminds me Roald Dahl, especially the early going explaining the origins of Theres.

Two old American books come to mind. One is the Parentcide Club by Ambrose Beirce. This is a collection of short stories filled with very black humor. The theme is self-explanatory, and I find the same theme in this and other Lindqvist works.

The other is Nathanael West The Day of Locust. This book shares the same type of pop-culture interests, with West it was Hollywood in the 1930s. Like Little Star, The Day of the Locust ends in an outburst of apocalyptic mass violence. Maybe not quite as pre-meditated as the Hitachi holocaust of Little Star, but I think the intentions are the same: a condemnation of the failings of society. Here is quote from West describing the ugly mob that concludes the novel:

the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers- all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All had made the necessary promise and were marching behind his banner a in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land.

I guess the main difference is that West focused on the middle aged losers in life, while Lindqvist focuses on the adolescent losers.