We, The Infected

THE OTHER
My book is about a vampire in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in the 1980s. It's also about being twelve years old. About love, too. And revenge. But a vampire is at the center of the plot. A real one, the kind that has to drink blood to stay alive.
The title alludes to what I think is the most morally fascinating thing about vampires: you have to invite them in order for them to get you. It's also the title of a song by Morrissey, "Let the Right One Slip In". An order: LET THIS HAPPEN!
There is almost no horror written in Swedish. Why not? No idea. The fear of the locked, dark room where something's crawling around in the corner is universal. But up until now, that room has been located in the US or England. Let's change that now.
My stories don't revel in blood and ickiness. Those things are there, of course, but above all they're about people who find themselves facing the Other. Our reality is frail and brittle, isn't it? We walk around in nice weather, do our homework and plan what kind of lumber we're going to use for the new porch. And at the same time... at the same time... there's only a thin membrane separating us from the downfall, the monsters, a blinding darkness. The Other. What happens when it seeps in? What do we do?
You might not feel this way, no. For you it's all about impregnated lumber, end of story.
I've felt this way since I was twelve, more or less. That's when I started reading horror. I had basically all of the books in the Kalla kårar series, if you remember? Those were finally books that were about how things really are. A kind of homecoming. Unlike the Pip-Larssons [children's book series] or Enid Blyton's character constellations - five, six, seven, or however many they were. Kalla kårar was reality. That's where I could recognize myself.
I was an outcast, of course. I did magic. Cards, coins, napkins. My second homecoming was when I got into Swedish Magic Circle as a thirteen-year-old. Everybody there was a freak. Bullied boys with a secret. Old men who drank whisky and showed card tricks to each other with trembling hands. I can weep with tenderness when I think of it. My family.
Oh, I feel better now. I was a standup comedian for twelve years. I'm married and love a lot, have a son. But when I started writing Let the Right One In, it was like finding my way back to something I'd forgotten. The basis of what I am - the horror and the magic. I couldn't understand how I'd managed to ignore it for so long.
So now here it is. The first Swedish vampire novel since Viktor Rydberg's Vampyren, to my knowledge. You don't need to feel the way I do. You can simply read it as a thriller. That's how it's written. But if you sense the presence of that membrane, the paper wall separating us from the unmentionable: read and relish. And welcome to the family.

A revelation in Swedish literature
The same autumn that a Soviet submarine runs aground in the Blekinge archipelago and the eyes of the world for once turn to the little country at the world's end, an odd couple discreetly move into a modest apartment in Blackeberg, one of Stockholm's gray and shabby concrete suburbs.
The reclusive couple, an older man and a young girl, arrive at night and seem to sleep during the day. Only after the fall of night one evening in the courtyard does the neighboring boy Oscar[sic] get to know the secretive girl and an unusual friendship begins.
This is not the opening of yet another mopey, autobiographical report of growing up in the depressing Swedish suburb. No, John Ajvide Lindqvist's debut novel Let the Right One In is something as refreshing as a genuine horror novel, set square in the middle of the retired Swedish folkhem.
Without revealing too much, it's safe to say that there are different kinds of bloodsuckers in Blackeberg in 1981 AD. Twelve-year-old Oscar[sic], the main character of the book, is a typical bullying victim, that is to say an arbitrarily chosen target who suffers daily humiliation at the hands of a group of coevals. Oscar dreams of the impossible: redress, yes, revenge.
In parallel with this pennalist drama, a police investigation is taking place. A boy has been murdered in Vällingby, but incredibly enough only after the body has been drained of blood. Rumors of ritual murder spread. But no one can really believe that a bestial murderer is running loose in the Blackeberg area.
Luckily, the police investigation is kept at an appropriate distance in Let the Right One In. Swedish crime novels a dime a dozen these days and John Ajvide Lindqvist is out on a different errand.
Instead the story focuses on Oscar[sic], the mysterious girl next door, Blackeberg's semi-criminal, glue-sniffing teenagers and the gang of alcoholics who after as usual having getting started at home hang out at the time period's classic wino refuge, the obligatory Chinese restaurant. Naturally we also get to know the cruel killer.
Because yes, this is indeed a horror novel as the cover implies. But far from only. John Ajvide Lindqvist skillfully weaves together the story's different threads and paints a full-bodied portrait of the Sweden of the early '80s that reeks of the suburb.
You never doubt that the author knows what he's talking about, but not only because he himself has a background in Blackeberg. No, the debutant John Ajvide Lindqvist writes just as unabashedly as a veteran novelist. The depiction of locations and characters is sharp and vivid, the psychological insight is strong and convincing, and the story is pulled forward with a lovely sense for dialogue, nerve and drama.
The novel's premise is perhaps not entirely original. It's of course a fairly tried and tested literary device to let the supernatural move into the apartment next door and, so to speak, give the devil a mundane form. But the execution is quite original. Because gradually through the book's four hundred pages, I realize that Let the Right One In is a revelation in Swedish literature. It is a stylish, thrilling horror novel and a painfully gripping depiction of childhood with an acrid stench of Swedish suburbia.
It's perhaps far too early in the year to talk about the Swedish debutant of the year. So let's hold off on that.
Moreover, the question will instead rather be if Let the Right One In is the best Swedish novel of the year. That's how good it is.

Chilling horror story with vampires in the suburb
Vampires in the folkhem. Strange that no one's come up with that idea before. That no one's thought that horror could be an effective tool for literarily depicting modern Sweden. Because now that John Ajvide Lindqvist has both thought and written, it seems so obvious.
Let the Right One In takes a firm grip around a piece of the Swedish eighties. The location is Blackeberg. A suburb which in 1981 had existed for three decades, a brand-new and innocent society. No history, no real disasters and therefore no readiness for what will come to take place there during three dreary autumn weeks.
A place where darkness grows under the neatly ordered surface, in spite of all the careful social planning. Or as one of the novel's characters states:
These buildings, the paths you walk, the the places, the people, everything is just ... like a single big damn sickness, see? Something is wrong. They thought this place out, planned it all out so it should be ... perfect. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead. Some shit.
The novel's nave is twelve-year-old Oskar. A bullied and despised boy who seeks comfort in horror stories and violent revenge fantasies. Then a couple new neighbors move into the building next door, a middle-aged man and a strange tomboy named Eli.
The two children make contact, and Lindqvist tenderly paints a picture of the emerging young love between two outcasts. And at the same time as the neighborhood youths are sniffing glue in the basement and the headlines are screaming out news about a Russian submarine outside Karlskrona, the suburb is shook by a couple of bestial murders.
The reader soon realizes that Eli is a vampire and the man her human accomplice, a pedophile who ensures that his young loved one gets what she needs. But it takes time before Oskar realizes who and what his new friend really is. Other than him, only the alcoholics at the Chinese restaurant gradually realize what's really causing a stir in Blackeberg. But who would listen to them? Really, the distance is not so great between a cast-out alcoholic and a dreaded vampire. Both stand slightly to the side of society, the type of people you prefer to avoid or pretend don't exist.
Intimate childhood depiction, spot-on depiction of society and chilling horror story. All of it at once, in other words, and entirely without creating any friction between the novel's various layers and aspects. Lindqvist superbly balances the thrilling against the moving, the dirty realism against the fantastical. It's borderline perfect.
But just like almost everything else in the genre, Lindqvist's novel suffers from unambiguity in the pure horror scenes. They're luckily quite few, but in a couple of places there is so much blood and guts and drooling madness that the fear completely vanishes. The more you see of the frightening, the sillier it becomes. Hints and shadows are always much creepier, and that is true here as well.
There is something grandiose and melancholy to Lindqvist's vampires, to their tragic chosenness and loneliness. In this sense he's reminiscent of Anne Rice, the genre's modern master - as well in his way of weaving a queer perspective into the tale. And just like her, he lets us see the world through the vampires' own point of view as well.
But there is still a great distance between Rice's bombastically romantic universe and Lindqvist's Swedish suburb. If Rice is opera, Lindqvist is punk. Let the Right One In reshapes the vampire myth in a form of shabby-gray, social realism, and fills it with everyday boredom, grocery stores and schoolyard torments.
The designation "horror novel" may scare off some readers. Not because they want to avoid the frightening, but because horror is still viewed as a lower-status genre here, as a kind of cheaply thrill-seeking entertainment literature. After John Ajvide Lindqvist, that particular myth should find it difficult to persist.

Debutant with a bite
7/10

A newly-written vampire novel in Swedish. It almost sounds too good to be true. John Ajvide Lindqvist has in his debut novel tackled the so seemingly simple subject of vampires. How hard can it be? A couple hot girls with fangs, some old distinguished gentleman with the same and then a couple unsuspecting teenagers in a cabin in the woods or a café along an American freeway and then a shitload of blood. Easy peasy. But what if you don't want to tell that story again? One of the most interesting things you can do has to be what Lindqvist has done. Treat it as a real story. Horror novel as serious literature. If vampires existed, how would they manifest in society? Would vampires choose to live in Blackeberg?
The wonderful prologue sets the tone for the entire book and does it well. At this stage, you're not quite sure what road we're going to take and we don't get any real clues either. It heightens the tension and expectations but not to unreasonable levels. You start to suspect that Lindqvist is something special. Slightly moreso than you might've expected, even if it could still go racing off in the Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton direction. There's nothing wrong with that direction but it's always more interesting when you manage to do something unexpected, something new.
Oskar lives with his mother and gets bullied pretty hard in school. He constantly exists on the edge. On the edge of criminality. On the edge of suicide. On the edge of being driven to murder. On the edge of addiction. On the edge of nothing. My thoughts go to Evil by Jan Guillou with the difference that Oskar doesn't have a choice. He can't hit back on any level. The most normal thing he has is the relationship to Mum but it feels almost like a dream. Something that's there in the background but doesn't affect real life. What can Mum really do in school?
This murder- and serial killer-obsessed boy meets the new neighbor girl Eli down at the playground late one evening when he's practicing stabbing his knife into trees who get to act as stand-ins for the bullies. She doesn't smell very good but she interests him somehow. If nothing else, she's a chance to start over, a new relation with someone who doesn't have any preconceived notions. He knows that there's something different about her. No one can solve a Rubik's Cube that quickly without cheating, and she doesn't feel cold when it's freezing outside either. Eli is as desperate in her own way and maybe together they become stronger?
Lindqvist has spent a lot of energy on the setting and giving the book the right feeling. He has succeeded very well and the feeling of being there is present at all times. No internet and no mobile phones you can call the emergency number on. Notknäckarna on TV and shrimp crépes was popular and Russian submarines get stranded in the archipelago. I myself remember how seriously people took the threat of nuclear war, it was a reality back then in a way that even I have difficulty picturing today. That's a feeling that's not really communicated in the book but that could on the other hand be a conscious move. Oscar[sic] has other things to worry about than nuclear war. More serious things.
As a contrast to the youths there is the gang of alcoholics, one of whom falls victim to the vampire and one of them saw the whole thing happen but who would believe what they're saying? These broken people drown their sorrows and try to find a way to get revenge or justice but what can you do? Not even the courage the alcohol gives is quite enough for them to dare.
Lindqvist shows extremely high class with this dark, somber, subtle and violent story and I look forward to the next release. Maybe a sequel in the modern day?
The only negative is that things sometimes move a bit slowly. Not to the point where it really becomes a chore but sometimes it still feels a bit sluggish. But how much does that matter when you, the rest of the time, get absorbed in one of the absolutely most exciting debuts this year? Not much. Not much at all.
I know what happens to a vampire who enters a house uninvited. Do you?

John Ajvide Lindqvist has with his debut thereby done the diversity of Swedish literature a great favor. Beyond that he has also written a very impressive novel that could very well measure up to some of the best international authors in the genre – the aforementioned Whitley Streiber and Poppy Z Brite are perhaps the ones that are the most similar. He is as familiar with the updated vampire mythology à la Anne Rice as he is in Swedish suburban life and a couple scenes in Let the Right One In are ones that a director like Stuart Gordon would kill to get to shoot. May John Ajvide Lindqvist continue on his path, so that perhaps going forward we can even the scales when it comes to horror novels.

Above all, the portrait of the bullied Oskar is very powerful, gripping and believable…. It is a sign of a great deal of literary courage by the author to give a go at writing a horror novel in Swedish. All the more impressive is the fact that John Ajvide Lindqvist has succeeded so well at his unusual endeavor. The strength of Let the Right One In is not only its creeping horror moods but first and foremost John Ajvide Lindqvist's well-developed ability to capture the atmosphere of the everyday and ordinary suburban life. And it is in contrast with the convincing realism that the horror depiction works. Let the Right One In is an unusually consummate debut.

It's a story about maturing, about growing as a person. And it's told with great precision. … It is in many ways a very good book, effectively written to boot. But it is at the same time very cruel and scary.

I love it. Spent several sleepless nights with »Let the Right One In«. Could not stop reading. More like this in contemporary literature, please.

When it comes to reading, it is sometimes healthy to get one's ingrained preconceived notions turned on their head. Had it not been for a good friend whose judgment I trust, I would never even have considered opening a book with vampires as a theme. Even the blood-stained cover gave me misgivings. However, after the novel's prologue I was helplessly stuck, and once I had gotten some distance into the book I found myself prepared to accept the existence of vampires in the middle of the everyday world that is ours.
[...]
There is only one piece of advice to give to those not yet enlightened by horror novels: Push any potential preconceived notions aside, read and »Let the Right One In«!

A beloved Blackeberg vampire

The sun is shining in Blackeberg. The drunks at the BBQ kiosk by the subway station seem utterly harmless. People encountering each other in the shops around the main square recognize each other, say hello and stop for friendly small talk. I buy a peach in the immigrant-run fruit and vegetable stand. The clock is almost three o'clock in the afternoon and all is well.

Yet it is with a sinking feeling that I stroll across the square. And that's not only due to stories I've heard of reality's stone-hard Blackeberg from people who grew up there in the '50s and '60s, or Stefan Jarl's dark-tinged documentaries about Kenta and Stoffe.

Primarily it's due to Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist's debut novel where a carefully depicted Blackeberg becomes the setting for a variety of horrors.

I'm otherwise generally pretty tired of novels. The Swedish book industry is overheated, the market is overflowing with fictions, each one identical to the next: Skillfully constructed, strictly templated products that most of the time leave me unaffected. I suppose that sooner or later it'll all burst like some IT bubble. A few years ago, an experienced old hand at publishing warned that the paperback editions would soon be so many that they'd have to be placed on the display shelves with their backs facing outward, and that would be the beginning of the end. And that day is here now.

But there are lights in the darkness.

One of the lights is Let the Right One In.

I'm not alone in loving this extremely thrilling and well-written debut novel. »John Ajvide Lindqvist has with his debut done the diversity of Swedish literature a great favor« to quote Jonas Thente's equally intelligent and effusive review in Dagens Nyheter. »Beyond that he has also written a very impressive novel that could very well measure up to some of the best international authors in the genre.«

I agree. I ate the book like candy. A conventional Swedish novel reader might, however, run into some problems with Ajvide's depictions of the supernatural.

Magical realism is not entirely OK in contemporary Swedish literature, whose constructions are expected to stay within the rules of reality as we scientifically know it. There is also a lot of super-sour and super-salty tastes in the goody bag. You taste blood, like when you overdosed on salmiak liquorice as a child. This is an orthodox horror story written by a man who grew up with Kalla Kårar, which means that your average Bokens Dag visitor will get as nauseous as she does from reading Stephen King.

Not that Stephen King is that author Ajvide prefers to compare himself to:

– Clive Barker, is instead the first thing he says when we meet at the square in Blackeberg.

He continues before I have a chance to reply:

– Books of Blood. Six volumes. You've got to read "In the Hills, the Cities" from the first volume, it's probably the best short story that's been published anywhere ever.

From his coat pocket he pulls out a well-thumbed copy of Volume IV of Barker's cult series, and states that Barker is much better than Stephen King, even if King is by all means a decent depictor of contemporary society.

John Ajvide Lindqvist is happy that DN's critic has compared him to Whitley Streiber and Poppy Z Brite, not the eternal King. Not to mention the happiness of not having to be compared to Dean Koontz, a bestselling horror author who according to John is so utterly trash that he gets the urge to »rip the book out of the hands of people reading Koontz«.

Allow me to express doubt. Yes, I'm sure Koontz is really that bad, but Ajvide hardly comes across as inclined to violence. He is mildly and unerringly polite, seems kind.

But still. »Plenty of gushing gore and flying flesh«, says the cover of Clive Barker's short story anthology that he loves so.

Admittedly, the book is primarily something different and something more than splatter; with time Clive Barker has been moved up from a B-level to the distinguished authors' shelf.

Barker and Ajvide Lindqvist both prove that the works of horror authors can have a place there, that flowing terror and flying bits of flesh doesn't automatically degrade a text.

I get excited. I've got to have Clive Barker's books, and – if I'm honest – it's as much for the ickiness' sake as it is for the literary quality.

Why? What is it in me that craves blood? Why do kind decent people read horror novels – and write them?

– I am fundamentally happy, says John Ajvide. But I have my darkness, and I have the privilege of getting to process it for a living.

To process the darkness, to conjure the evil that exists in oneself and in the world, is a believable and neat reason to love horror. But John Ajvide seems to have first and foremost written his thriller because he thought it was fun, and it is sometimes fun to read. Some passages are so twisted that the violence becomes comical.

Don't get me wrong. Let the Right One In is generally no laugh riot. Quite the opposite. It's a depiction where the supernaturally terrible takes place in a completely normal Swedish suburb, where the middle-school children's lives are characterized by completely normal, realistically depicted Swedish bullying sadism.

The depictions of this sadism – of cruelty the equivalent of which occurs around us every day – are so painful to read that they're almost unbearable.

The novel's main character, 12-year-old Oskar, is subjected to systematic psychological and physical violence. You wish for him to be saved from his hell by an angel with white wings, like in some Hollywood film. Instead he meets the vampire Eli.

I buy it wholeheartedly. It's a testament to the quality of Ajvide's fiction that the tragic young bloodsucker Eli feels just as psychologically believable as Oskar does. John Ajvide Lindqvist depicts all his characters – and there are many, his text is teeming with them – with tender care:

– You have to create believable characters that the reader cares about, he explains kindly and lights a cigarette. Otherwise it won't be scary. And my primary goal is to make it scary. I'm story-driven.

– The psychological believability is a tool in my novel, not a goal.

He says it over a beer at Blackeberg Wok & Bar, a local pub with a central role in Let the Right One In, housed on the ground floor of one of Blackeberg's few high-rises. In the book, as in reality, Wok & Bar is the usual locus for the suburb's alcoholics and semi-alcoholics, the astrays, the ones who stand teetering with at least one foot outside of society.

The novel character Lacke is one of them. Seen through his eyes, the sleepy town of Blackeberg is a wrongly constructed, skewed place where it's actually impossible to live.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, who himself spent his first nineteen years of his life in Blackeberg, has a warmer outlook on his home area than Lacke. He is readily prepared to present Blackeberg to the uninitiated as a really nice suburb – well-planned, situated close to woods and water. But his personal relationship to the place seems to be more complex.

He says that he has surface similarities with Oskar, that similar events with the same meaning as in Let the Right One In have happened in real life. Sometimes I think I sense a pain which I, in that case, don't think I have the right to start poking around in. I suppose that a love-hate relationship to one's place of upbringing is simply something that a lot of people have. More than one Jante backwater has been put on the literary maps for that reason.

– It's practical for an author to choose a place where you know every path, every tree, where everything is, says John Ajvide Lindqvist.

– Everything here in Blackeberg sits, if not in my heart, then at least in my skeleton.

That comes across when reading, and I love it since I love novels that can be used as guide books. To read Let the Right One In is to really get under the skin of not only the characters but also the location being depicted. Even if John Ajvide time and again – as he shepherds me between the crime scenes while chainsmoking – discovers changes that have taken place since the time the book was written.

They've demolished the mysterious rumbling tower that gives Lacke[sic] drunken hallucinations. The streetlights have been replaced, Wok & Bar is under new management, the pine branch where the vampire Eli sits and waits for a victim has been cut off. And – worst of all! – the graffiti on the Ghost House has inexplicably been sanitized.

– What a waste! we exclaim in a disappointed chorus, and the Blackeberg of the book suddenly becomes realer than reality's.

Reality, where we stand staring at a metal wall with traces left of a fantastic lost image, is only a mutilated version of fiction.

A horrifying fiction, in other words, but with a happy ending. Or? Eli saves Oskar from his tormenters, in a finale entirely worthy, after all, of Stephen King – whose signum is of course to let the bullying victim get bloody occult revenge.

Oskar and his beloved vampire then leave Blackeberg together, for a shared future life that one prefers not to dwell on. Eli can't always kill on their own to get the blood they need to live. Eli needs a murderer. And Oskar, as is made clear at the very start of the book, is murderer material.

– Oskar will have a difficult life, says John Ajvide, but he's happy when the book ends. It's a happy ending.

Well. I don't agree, even if a happy ending is what I would've wished for. It's what Oskar and Eli deserve. I internally fantasize about a continuation of their story à la Joakim Pirinen's Familjen Bra: They move into a rowhouse area where kind neighbors offer to become, er, blood donors. No more horrors. No more murders. No unhappiness. Peace and love.

No trouble, no story. John Ajvide solemnly swears that there won't be such a continuation.

Instead he's writing a new novel, Handling the Undead, where Swedish society suddenly needs to handle recently deceased people returning from the other side en masse. The zombies in question are nice as far as I understand, but it'll likely be complicated enough anyway. I'm not told exactly how complicated. The question is if even John Ajvide Lindqvist himself knows yet:

– I don't have a detailed plan when I work, even if some events are clear to me beforehand. I write, see what happens, throw it away if it doesn't work, rewrite. Every Friday I read what I've written the past week aloud to my wife, so I've got to have something to bring to the table.

He speaks fondly of his wife Mia as his inspiration, listener and critic. After literary studies and attempts to write »normal« plays and short stories that didn't quite want to turn out good, he decided to start writing horror literature, and that was in large part because Mia in her job as a folk high school teacher had immersed herself in the history of horror. Which made John realize: »Why not try to write something like that myself? I, who've always loved the genre?«

The family lives on Rådmansö in Roslagen, in a house John Ajvide inherited from his father, and Friday evenings are in other words read-aloud evenings. I find myself thinking that me and my husband also have to start practicing this at home – stories by the campfire – and that one could exchange one's cramped apartment box in downtown Stockholm for a large flat in Blackeberg.

Blackeberg is, after all, highly inhabitable. It's a part of the city built pre-Million Program, modeled on small towns. The subway station opened for traffic as early as 1952 and is situated next to a central square with a fancy fountain, embraced by shops, cafés and a cinema. Low rows of houses radiate from there in green environs.

»Blackeberg«, it is written in the annals, »is considered a fine example of the early '50s neighborhood units in modest scale with variation and care for material, shape and color.«

Yes. Nice suburb. Well-planned. Close to woods and water. A just-shabby-enough local pub where the family author can sit alone sometimes and think. Thirty minutes with public transit to the inner city. A home for vampires. Hm.

John Ajvide Lindqvist and I leave Blackeberg Wok & Bar to take the subway downtown. He's going to take the opportunity to watch Dawn of the Dead in the cinema now that he's in Stockholm. He expresses his love for film: Reza Parsa's Före stormen, which is possibly the best depiction of the 12-year-old land between childhood and teenage years he knows, the land which his own main characters also inhabit. Classic movies with perfect screenplays à la Casablanca. The Naked Lunch by David Cronenberg, the movie he's rewatched the most times.

To my great jealousy he also reveals that he saw Morrissey live at the Hultsfred Festival. I, who haven't even bought Morrissey's latest CD yet, is of course no true fan compared to John Ajvide Lindqvist, who knows every song on every Morrissey album by heart. But I still have to point out that "Every Day Is Like Sunday" has a permanent place on my total top 10 list. And before I even started reading Let the Right One In, I could identify the title as a Morrissey quote.

»Let the right one slip in«. A good song. And now, a good book. In the world of texts, outside time, you can ask yourself who really borrowed the title from who. Morrissey is a constant title thief, and Blackeberg, seen through Lacke's gloomy eyes, could be the perfect subject of a Morrissey song: »Every day is like Sunday, every day is silent and gray, this is the town that they forgot to bomb, come, come, come Armageddon, come«

And Armageddon comes. With a whisper, not with a bang, in the form of a beautiful neither-boy-nor-girl who remains twelve years old forever and sleeps all day in a bathtub full of blood. It's more than splatter. It's a picture of an innocent, raped child who after the assault can no longer grow, no longer live without themselves destroying. §