I don't need an epilogue.

[sauvin]

Blackeberg's creators believed they could plan for everything. However the effect was that Blackeberg was created without a soul, and this lack of soul was poisoning all of its inhabitants. Every single character was damaged.

This is something that I have a real problem with in the book, to me it sounds too much much like a political statement being passed off as fact. Blackeberg is a real place, not somewhere that has been invented for a work of fiction. There is no evidence that living there corrupts people in the way that JAL claims it does. In fact the problems that are mentioned are common in most cities in western countries.

Quite. Blackeberg then itself becomes a kind of avatar, doesn't it?

[lombano]

Planned communities, it is, true, tend not to work. Yet what, precisely, is so awful at Blackeberg? Does the place turn its inhabitants into what they are, or is Blackeberg the way it is because of its inhabitants? To me at least, Blackeberg does not seem, in and of itself, so awful, (the place as distinct from the people that live there) - I view Blackeberg as being so bad because of its denizens (so that Erik, for example, carries his own Blackeberg with him), not because of the conditions more or less inherent to the place.

[PeteMork]

I don't agree there wouldn't have been "much of a story". Eli didn't have to be a vampire. She didn't have to be either eternal or physically monstrous. She could have been a homeless waif with some kind of murderous multiple personality disorder without changing the story substantially. Even the murderousness is optional! She simply had to be some fundamentally socially unacceptable being for Oskar to meet, get to liking, find out about and have trouble accepting, be saved by and run away with. The only caveat here is that it'd take an Alfredson to pull the chemistry off just so.

I absolutely disagree with this. Låt den rätte komma in was a story about how Blackeberg was place full of the man-made horrors of indifference, apathy, and cruelty, and how it took something even more horrible for Oskar to escape from it. Blackeberg's creators believed they could plan for everything. However the effect was that Blackeberg was created without a soul, and this lack of soul was poisoning all of its inhabitants. Every single character was damaged. Eli represented something outside the knowledge of Blackeberg's creators - or perhaps something whose existence they rejected just as they had rejected the need for a soul. Isn't this what JAL said in the prologue to the novel?

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past: there wasn't even a church.

Eli had to be mystical, to be non-human, even mythological. I suppose I agree with you in that by being a mystical horror, Eli was "fundamentally socially unacceptable". The mysticism of her vampirism represented the things that JAL told us the planners of Backeberg had found to be "fundamentally socially unacceptable".

At the risk of seeming to be elitist, isn’t the major flaw in the concept of Blackeberg, more a matter of whom they chose to inhabit this new area, rather than the supposedly impersonal physical layout or lack of churches? It’s not that it was created without a soul - the “soul” is what the inhabitants bring with them. The same mistake was made in the U.S. when well-meaning groups set up large high-rise apartment complexes for the poor, apparently not realizing, or at least not planning for the fact that long-term poverty creates a disproportionately dysfunctional subculture. These buildings were quickly trashed, and the crime rate, despite the best intentions of the founders, soared. Many of these buildings, although only a couple of decades old, had to be torn down because of the abuse and lack of follow-up maintenance they had experienced over this relatively short period of time.

I would be inclined to think that, even in Sweden, people who had well-established residences and stable communities, would not have moved into Blackeberg, leaving whatever in Swedish society constituted the type of people who would make such a move, i.e., the disenfranchised and poor. Blackeberg didn’t create the problem; the people who brought their problems with them, did.

And, once the “dark magic” of Blackeberg is taken away, I think a writer like JAL could easily pull LTROI off in a scenario similar to that suggested by Sauvin. And that story would be far more likely to have a true happy ending.

Planned communities, it is, true, tend not to work. Yet what, precisely, is so awful at Blackeberg? Does the place turn its inhabitants into what they are, or is Blackeberg the way it is because of its inhabitants? To me at least, Blackeberg does not seem, in and of itself, so awful, (the place as distinct from the people that live there) - I view Blackeberg as being so bad because of its denizens (so that Erik, for example, carries his own Blackeberg with him), not because of the conditions more or less inherent to the place.

QFT

[genie47]

Planned communities, it is, true, tend not to work. Yet what, precisely, is so awful at Blackeberg? Does the place turn its inhabitants into what they are, or is Blackeberg the way it is because of its inhabitants? To me at least, Blackeberg does not seem, in and of itself, so awful, (the place as distinct from the people that live there) - I view Blackeberg as being so bad because of its denizens (so that Erik, for example, carries his own Blackeberg with him), not because of the conditions more or less inherent to the place.

I live in a nation of planned communities. You have just described Singapore. It is not an awful place. I won't go to details. Our hell is different from Blackberg.

[sauvin]

And, once the “dark magic” of Blackeberg is taken away, I think a writer like JAL could easily pull LTROI off in a scenario similar to that suggested by Sauvin. And that story would be far more likely to have a true happy ending.

Planned communities, it is, true, tend not to work. Yet what, precisely, is so awful at Blackeberg? Does the place turn its inhabitants into what they are, or is Blackeberg the way it is because of its inhabitants? To me at least, Blackeberg does not seem, in and of itself, so awful, (the place as distinct from the people that live there) - I view Blackeberg as being so bad because of its denizens (so that Erik, for example, carries his own Blackeberg with him), not because of the conditions more or less inherent to the place.

QFT

Yup. I'll cheerfully enough admit I hadn't considered what Blackeberg was supposed to be in the statement triggering much of the discsussion here. I was thinking more in terms of the dynamic between Eli and Oskar, forgetting for a moment that Eli herself brings into Blackeberg her own cascade failure with profound ripple effects throughout an already unstable community. All this discussion of "projects" brings back for me the ugly spectre of Cabrini Greens.

PeterMork, a "happy ending" may or may not be more easily pulled off with a completely human but still fundamentally "socially unacceptable" girlfriend. Imagine a girl subject to an incurable kind of seizure disorder that temporarily gives her apparently superhuman strength but an unfortunate compulsion to murder, or maybe just some incurable (and possibly even untreatable) mental illness? In one sense, a kind of "happy ending" is possible in that she wouldn't be able to turn Oskar, and the boon would be in maturing physically (sexually) in lockstep with him, but instead of finding it a truly liberating experience, I'm sadly confident he'd find himself no less barred from society at large than what we expect is now the case with Eli. "All things die", Wolfchild says, but even with my 100% Natural Woman conjecture, life is apt to be harrowing, brutal and short.

As for Blackeberg's designers being unable to anticipate either the existing Eli or the one I suggest here, well... the real failure here, as in so many other endeavours (prisons, sanitaria, high schools) is in worrying much more about the mechanics of plumbing and ventilation and in completely ignoring emotional and social issues. Cabrini Greens, for example, as I understand it, went only partway towards helping the poor; jobless and futureless, the project was just a prison without visible bars.

[drakkar]

About Blackeberg: Some time ago this question rose, and StefL was writing a bit about the history of Blackeberg.
From the top of my head: The neighborhood was troubled during the seventies, having problems with drugs, as stated in LdRKI. Which probably took place close to the end of the bad period. Today Blackeberg is a quite popular place to live. And judging from their "homepage" blackeberg.org this seems reasonable, I think this is a remarkable resourceful site for a community of only 8000 inhabitants.
And in less than five weeks I will try to make up my own mind about the place.

[PeteMork]

PeterMork, a "happy ending" may or may not be more easily pulled off with a completely human but still fundamentally "socially unacceptable" girlfriend. Imagine a girl subject to an incurable kind of seizure disorder that temporarily gives her apparently superhuman strength but an unfortunate compulsion to murder, or maybe just some incurable (and possibly even untreatable) mental illness? In one sense, a kind of "happy ending" is possible in that she wouldn't be able to turn Oskar, and the boon would be in maturing physically (sexually) in lockstep with him, but instead of finding it a truly liberating experience, I'm sadly confident he'd find himself no less barred from society at large than what we expect is now the case with Eli. "All things die", Wolfchild says, but even with my 100% Natural Woman conjecture, life is apt to be harrowing, brutal and short.

I dunno about this specific scenario. I was thinking more about a scenario with a Lina Leandersson who happened to own a very big gun and a EuroRail pass.

As for Blackeberg's designers being unable to anticipate either the existing Eli or the one I suggest here, well... the real failure here, as in so many other endeavours (prisons, sanitaria, high schools) is in worrying much more about the mechanics of plumbing and ventilation and in completely ignoring emotional and social issues. Cabrini Greens, for example, as I understand it, went only partway towards helping the poor; jobless and futureless, the project was just a prison without visible bars.

QFT

[PeteMork]

About Blackeberg: Some time ago this question rose, and StefL was writing a bit about the history of Blackeberg.
From the top of my head: The neighborhood was troubled during the seventies, having problems with drugs, as stated in LdRKI. Which probably took place close to the end of the bad period. Today Blackeberg is a quite popular place to live. And judging from their "homepage" blackeberg.org this seems reasonable, I think this is a remarkable resourceful site for a community of only 8000 inhabitants.
And in less than five weeks I will try to make up my own mind about the place.

I've tried to control myself for the longest time, but I give up! YOU LUCKY DOGS! Please take lots of pictures, lots of notes and share them all with us. (I'm sure you will ) Blackeberg's web site is illuminating, to say the least. Rest assured, if I am ever anywhere near Stockholm, I will vist the area. It looks like they totally have their act together, and are probably wiser as a community because of their past.

I wish with all my heart that I could join you all there!

[Microwave Jellyfish]

^Seconded^

Finally someone said what everyone's thinking.

[DMt.]

Blackeberg is ANY 'Social housing' [UK] or 'Housing Project' [US] neighbourhood; populated, as noted above, by 'the poor and disenfranchised'. Thus it is also, let's say, Brooklyn or Queens in NY, Hulme or Wythenshawe in Manchester [UK], Brixton in London, the list goes on and on. Maybe every major city has its Blackeberg [as was then, I'm very happy to hear that the people there have turned it around].

The interesting bit, to me, is the effect Eli has on this sink of despair, and particularly on Oskar, who is slated by his environment to become, well, another Tommy, but ends up somewhere else entirely...[cue FF/epilogue].