Instagram version: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdd9QNkBoKy/
YouTube version:
Like last time, I've translated and summarized all the parts I think could be of interest to his international fans. A few of the questions were in English and he answered those in English, so in those cases I simply transcribed them. Obviously. Time stamps and questions are in bold, John's answers in italics.
This time, John read aloud the names of most of the people who sent in the questions. I don't know how any of them would feel about having their real names mentioned on this site, so I've left them out of the transcript—with the exception of me and danielmann861, who both had questions answered.
00:00:45
JAL began by thanking Hans-Åke Lilja, who manages his website and social media and makes the live events possible. Hans-Åke had forwarded the questions sent in through the website, and also spent the stream rounding up and sending questions being asked on Instagram that JAL might otherwise have missed.
00:03:20 [in English] Do you have any spiritual beliefs?
No, I don't, unfortunately. I was very interested in religion in a younger age, and I've read a lot about religious beliefs and... different ways that people have... tried to connect with something larger than themselves in the past. And I still do. I have a book about medieval scholasticism on my nightstand at the present. I'm reading about Thomas Aquinas and all that. So I'm still very interested in how people are... as I said, trying to connect with something bigger than themselves. A lot of my recent books have dealt with this theme, people trying to establish a contact with something else. But me myself, I don't have what you might call a spiritual belief, no. But I'm pragmatic. If people believe in God, or if they claim to have seen a ghost or a spirit, or been touched by another presence... it's very possible. Very possible. But not me myself, I don't have any system of beliefs.
00:04:45 [in Swedish] A couple times over the years, you've mentioned a potential sequel novel to LTROI. Is that idea still on the table or have you scrapped it? [This was the question I sent. I made a standalone thread about it in the LTROI section.]
Siggdalos, I recognize you. You've asked... that I've talked about a potential sequel to Let the Right One In, my first book. Yes, so I got a type of... a bit more than an image, more something akin to a vision. In a bathroom in Los Angeles, of all places. It had nothing to do with work. Holiday trip. But when I came in there, for some reason, I got some kind of complete image for how a sequel to Let the Right One In could look. What it was going to be about, how it would feel, and everything was completely clear to me for a moment. And I kept that feeling for a while, and then somewhere along the way it disappeared.
But it was going to take place in the present day and be about Oskar and Eli and what happened to them afterwards and where they are now. It was going to pertain to, I recall, that Oskar had to come back to Blackeberg because his mother had died, and... there was more, but unfortunately I've forgotten it.
I can't help it. I believe in what Stephen King says about that: to not write too much down, because the bad stuff disappears along the way, the stuff that didn't truly have any vitality. You remember the other stuff. And I have so darned much other stuff. I know that there are those who'd think it'd be fun with a sequel to Let the Right One In, and maybe it'll come back. [laughs] Maybe if I go back to Los Angeles and walk into that bathroom again... But at present, no. I have many books ahead of me that I want to write, and that one isn't one of them.
It was maybe going to be called... but it's such an unwieldy Swedish title. I've of course used "Let the right one in", "Let the old dreams die", and "What kept you so long?". A short story that very vaguely serves as a followup. So for titles, I really only had "Until my mouth dries" left, which is a pretty cool title in English. Trickier in Swedish. "Tills min mun torkar ut"? Ehh. To use the same song, that is, more lines from that.
00:07:15 [in English] From where do you have those bizarre ideas for your books? Is it something to do with your childhood and society in the past and present?
[in Swedish] Hell if I know. I get images. I was a magician for many years, I was a standup comedian for many years, and during that period I also wrote a lot of texts for other standup comedians. My brain was hardwired to see the funny, comical, bizarre, strange in our lives, or to make up things outside of that, and so that plough trail was drawn up in my brain. But ever since I eventually figured out that I was going to write horror, and it turned out to work and could even be done for a living, that's the plough that goes through my brain. That's what my images look like.
I realized to my sorrow, to some extent... A couple years ago, I was given an offer because of old contacts from when I wrote a TV show named Reuter & Skoog. The guy who directed the series, Anders Lenhoff, who is now working on the American Song Contest, he was now a producer or something alongside Christer Björkman for Melodifestivalen. He wondered if I wanted to help write the script for the sketches and all the funny things they do aside from the music. And I said: "Give me two days so I can test if I'm still funny."
I wasn't. I couldn't come up with those kinds of things. The plough trail was incorrectly drawn. I had ONE funny idea, which was that people who'd worked very much in the background of Melodifestivalen had now gotten great careers because of it. For example, a picture of the guy who'd worked in the background with the smallest pyrotechnics, and now in the present day you'd see that he was the one who'd created the giant mining pit in Kiruna using explosives. But that was the only funny idea I had, so I didn't take that job.
[reads the question again and laughs]
[in English] Sorry, I switched back to Swedish. It's just images coming up, and I can't really say where they come from. I just talked about this earlier, where I had this, like... vision for a full-scale follow-up novel to Let the Right One In. It just came to me, and then I lost it. And I couldn't get back to that feeling, the thing I wanted to do, which I thought at the moment in this bathroom in Los Angeles: "WOW! This is a great idea, this is a great general feeling for the book." Like the idea of snow in Let the Right One In, when I decided that it would take place in winter and there would be snow, which was important to the feeling of the book. I had a similar kind of feeling towards Until My Mouth Dries, if that's the name of it, and then I lost it. So I don't really know, I can't control this. I still have a lot of images in my head which I could base stories on, but usually it's when two or three of these images start to collide. Then the basis of a story is formed. Otherwise, if you have just one idea... okay, you could write a 7 or 8-page short story from just one idea, but for a long one with 20, 30, 40 pages you need more things colliding, creating friction. But where the images come from, I do not know. They're just there and demand to be taken into use somehow.
Okay. Sorry for inadvertently switching back into Swedish. [starts speaking Italian, then back to English] No, we're not going to do that. Sorry, switching back to Swedish now.
00:11:30 [in Swedish] How much veto and control does one have over one's text when it comes to publication? If one has problematic scenes, how free is one in one's writing in relation to the publisher?
That can of course vary a lot. Ordfront, who are my publishers, have been very hands-off in relation to me, so I can basically write whatever I want. They had some opinions about Let the Right One In many years ago, that they wanted some things to switch places, to add a prologue, and things like that. The editor I had then, Elisabeth Watson, was more along the lines of: "There's not enough blood! More horror! More blood!" "Yes yes yes, I'll do my best." These days I have Jan-Erik Pettersson as my editor. He was the one who discovered Let the Right One In. He was the one who picked it up and said: "This one we want! Yippee!" like in Ferdinand the Bull. These days he's my editor, and he might point out grammatical errors or factual errors, especially if it concerns football, but otherwise I have to say that I'm very free to write the way I want.
It can almost sound a little presumptuous, but I did a book together with my wife that's completely outside my norm, called Alternative Facts About Birds, where I simply wrote 25 completely absurdist observations about Swedish birds as well as a couple made-up ones. I sent 3 of those texts to Pelle Andersson, who's the publishing director and nowadays owner of Ordfront. He said: "I see, okay, good, but when do we get the rest? When can we publish it?" Even though it was a book outside the norm, in other words. So I think that Ordfront has deemed that if I've written a book and it's not completely awful, there might be a few people who want to read it. And that's of course an immense privilege as an author. And then, of course, there often ARE many people who want to listen to or read it, so I get to continue. But when it comes to limits... that's so different with different publishers and who you are as an author, so I can't say anything in general about limits and... [reads the question again] "nitpicking". "How much nitpicking is there when it comes to film and TV screenplays..."
[laughs and pulls a finger over his neck] That's a different story. THERE things are nitpicked to hell and back. I would've written maybe... I wouldn't have written at a Stephen King pace, but I would've written maybe an additional 3-4 novels by now if I hadn't worked on film and TV projects that have just died. I had gotten to version #16 on some episodes of the Little Star TV series for HBO and worked on that for a year before they said: "Nah, we don't think we'll be doing this after all." It's a lot of time. Or the time when me and Tomas Alfredson worked on The Brothers Lionheart. It's a lot, film and TV, but it's really fun. And sometimes it actually ends up getting made, for crying out loud! And ends up being good, in my case. I've had a lot of luck.
00:15:00 Do you reread your texts sometimes and how do you feel about that? Have you regretted anything you've written?
No, I never reread any of my texts just for fun. I might flip through a book sometimes to refresh my memory on something. Primarily I reread them when I record them as audiobooks. It's fun, because it's like a goodbye to the text. It's often a good while after I've written it and I'm often far ahead into writing something else. But then came this old goodie, The Reality, which I recorded a couple of months ago even though it'd been a year since I wrote it. And it was fun, because while reading I realized: "Huh. It's good. Nice quality on the prose. I did good on this one." Because one should know when it comes to The Reality that I wrote it in five weeks or something. I won't spoil, even though we've promised spoilers, but I got the image of how Heidi sits in an armchair, miked, ready, and made-up. She sees a dying fly on the windowsill. She looks into the camera, looks back, and it's gone. And then it was just a matter of posing a lot of questions to myself. Why is she sitting in that armchair? What's this context she's getting interviewed in? And how the hell did the fly disappear? And then I just had to pose a lot of questions to myself to figure it out.
Yes, that was the question about... God, I drift off-topic a lot. No, I don't reread my texts. And [in terms of regrets] I've written a short story named Ett fall i vila, which I wrote for some kind of Expressen supplement a number of years ago, and it's by far the worst thing I've written. There are still people who tease me for having written it in the first place. It was such a good basic idea. One of these "locked room" mysteries. But then it went off the rails.
00:17:05 Do you have any concrete tips about writing discipline?
No, I don't really have... Or actually, I have a tip. Of course, if you are an aspiring writer, it's about sitting down a certain hour... If you only have one hour. Might be you're studying or working, but you have an hour. This hour is devoted to your writing. Sit that hour out. Might be you don't write a single word. But this is the hour when you're GOING to write, even if you maybe don't manage to. And in relation to family, friends, whatever you have... you can, generally speaking, set aside ONE hour. Moa Martinson wrote at night. Or maybe I shouldn't act like... No, actually, I've worked at a daycare and had my brain full of how to solve all the conflicts between children at the same time as I wrote a number of my things. But that was a short period.
Now I'm drifting off-topic again. Writing discipline. Nowadays I have it, after I basically got writer's block with my novel I Am Behind You. Eventually my son cheered me on and said: "Just write a few pages. Decide to do it. Write two or three pages, and they're allowed to turn out badly." I thought that everything I wrote turned out bad. I'd written maybe a third of the book. I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, deleted them. "Everything is crap. Why am I doing this? Who's interested in this? What's the point of doing this in the first place?" But eventually, after two months of non-writing, I decided: "They're allowed to turn out badly, but I'm going to write three pages a day. And if I've written four pages, I'm allowed to quit if I want to." And in that way the problem was solved. After that I started writing at least three pages a day, but more commonly more. And they didn't turn out so bad. [laughs] That book is pretty flipped out, maybe partially because I was forced to give myself pretty loose reins.
00:19:25 Which horror book and film have affected you the most?
[grins and shows off his "Haddonfield High School" t-shirt] I think the majority of people watching this understand the reference. Got it from my son for Christmas, or was it a birthday present? I think it was a birthday present. Halloween. But I think the one that has really affected me most is the film Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart, the novella it's based on, by Clive Barker who also wrote and directed the film. It's probably the film I've seen the most times. I talked earlier about transcendence, to reach outside humanity's earthbound limits, and that's what Hellraiser is about. Admittedly in this case it's about pleasure, a person who is completely decadent and has gone through everything there is to experience in terms of pleasure with the body on Earth, and wants to reach out to the Cenobites and the Lament Configuration... which, by the way, the Rubik's Cube in Let the Right One In is my little nod to. This puzzle box that allows you to contact the Cenobites, who can offer pleasures beyond what he could've imagined or experienced in his life on Earth. But then, of course, these pleasures are nothing like what he'd hoped for. That concept, along with Pinhead whom many are familiar with and the Cenobites... The mere idea of reaching outside of one's human conditions, and that this offer from the other side then turns out to be something completely different from what you'd thought it be. So in total, I'd say Hellraiser, but now I've got this lovely t-shirt, so... It's no fun if it just says "Halloween" or "Scream", it's more fun with a little reference. Like a tourist shirt from the Overlook Hotel or something.
00:21:55 Who are your own favorite authors and what do you listen/read to yourself?
My favorite author is Selma Lagerlöf, or... she's on par with Gabriel García Márquez. But with that said... I showed off a bit by speaking Italian earlier. I've read Io non ho paura or I'm Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti three times since I almost want to know it by heart. It's in Italian and I learn a bunch of words by learning it by heart. A fantastic book. So bloody stripped down, linguistically stylish, great story. He was also the one who wrote Il miracolo, the fantastic TV series where they find a Madonna statue crying blood. But yes, Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti, I can really recommend that one.
That said, Lagerlöf and Márquez are my favorite authors, a little bit Julio Cortázar too, but I would also really like to show the best book I've read in many years. I was so bloody surprised that it was so good: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Me and my wife read aloud to each other a lot, and this was one of the books we did it with. I think it's a... It was after he got the Nobel Prize. I mean, several of you have probably seen the film The Remains of the Day or read the book, or When We Were Orphans, or The Unconsoled. I've read all of those and thought they were great, Ishiguro is an author I follow, but Klara and the Sun... that was something else. The main character is a robot, one of these you're supposed to take home and keep as company or use for chores or take care of children. In a way it's about trying to understand... life, as the robot Klara is trying to do from her own limited conditions. It's incredibly moving, beautiful, tense. Fantastic prose. I can't recommend it enough.
00:25:10 What do you think of Let Me In?
What I usually say is that I think that Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson's film, is one of the best Swedish films I've seen and one of the best horror films I've seen. Let Me In is one of the best American horror films I've seen, from 2000 onwards. So it needs to be narrowed down, but I still think it's a great movie. I don't think it's a masterpiece like Tomas Alfredson's film, but I think it's a VERY good film. Matt Reeves and I communicated a bit both before and after, and it really came from real engagement. He was really moved by the story and wanted to do it, in his own way. He focused on slightly different aspects than Tomas Alfredson did and has a different basic mood than Tomas. It's more of a horror movie. But I think it's great.
00:26:35 Why didn't you narrate the I Am Behind You audiobook?
It was my neighbor and old stand-up colleague, Thomas Oredsson, who narrated that one. I didn't have the time. I don't remember what it was. It might've been the Little Star TV series I was working on at the time. And that was before we'd established the current system of me sitting in my bedroom wardrobe and recording, so it would've meant having to go back and forth to a studio in Stockholm many times.
00:27:15 I really liked The Kindness but I'm glad you returned to the horror genre with The Reality. Why did The Kindness depart from the horror genre and why is it so long?
I'm glad you think The Reality is a return to the horror genre, but I don't really know if it is. There is a really scary scene toward the end, but... I can't help the images I get. Once again, the plough in my brain. But some of it isn't pure horror, it's to examine images. In The Kindness, I had five main characters from the start whom I'd seen, three guys and two girls, and then I wrote pretty detailed character portraits of them where I wrote who they are, what their background is, where they're going. I let them talk to me in a monologue to tell me what kind of people they are. And I thought those characters became so interesting, particularly Johan who was supposed to be a completely marginal character but grew and grew and became a more and more interesting person... I also wanted to write a fat, epic novel about Norrtälje, since Norrtälje is a tad underrepresented in literature, and it ended up being fat.
Primarily, I got so much feeling when I wrote The Kindness. It was during two years on Cuba. It was one of the novels that took the shortest time to write, 7 or 8 months in total, since I often wrote 10-14 pages a day for a period of several weeks. It ran away with me, for better or worse. I know that in my notes, I wrote that I wanted to go back to the freshness of when I wrote Let the Right One In, to just... forget about the rules. Let it come. Let it be. Since Little Star, I think I've been more controlled in my language, thought more about HOW I write things. With The Kindness, I wanted to... let myself out to pasture. For example, there's a part of the book called "Marko's party", which I thought would be 8 or 10 pages. I think it ended up being 40 or 50, just because it was so fun when these characters clashed with each other in different ways. So that's why it ended up being so long: I got so much feeling.
And really, The Reality also stems from a feeling, in that I was working on another one of these super long projects. I was writing an American TV series, in English, and it was a grandiose project. I would've more or less become financially independent for the rest of my life if everything had worked out, which contributed to the fact that I worked on it for so long, before it capsized and there started being too many investors and producers and people with opinions, and it was too complicated, and... But then there was a pause during the contract negotiations and all that where I didn't really know what to do, and then I got the image of the woman in the armchair and the fly, and went "What the hell". And then I wrote it really quickly. Parallel with it I was working on renovating a cabin and building a roof, but during the in-between periods when I was waiting for lumber, I wrote The Reality. It was a very good tale to have in that situation.
00:31:55 What is Peter Himmelstrand's best song?
[laughs] That's the type of question I like! I have to give a boring answer. I really like, and have on several occasions sung, Stockholmare skulle bara skjutas. But I have to say Det börjar verka kärlek, banne mej, unfortunately. I like Hambostinta i kort-kort a lot. I'm very fond of Så här börjar kärlek with Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and it's also mentioned in I Am Behind You. I can really recommend it. It's kind of a Swedish Strangers in the Night. It's a bit similar to it in terms of mood. But I'll still say Det börjar verka kärlek, banne mej. For a long time, I considered that one and Tusen och en natt to be the best songs in Melodifestivalen ever, but as early as this year's first heat I decided that Hold Me Closer [Sweden's representative in this year's Eurovision] is better. So... [crosses fingers] Yeah. I think it's fantastic. Fantastic performance, fantastic song.
00:33:55 Are you coming to the Gothenburg Book Fair this year?
Yes, I am! There's been a couple years' hiatus now, but I am. I'll on one hand have a talk with Erik Helmerson, who's written a book about social media and a Moderate politician. I haven't read it yet, but I'll do it before then. I also usually go on the Church of Sweden's Se människan stage, since I think that's fun. There are often theologians or priests holding the talks and who often want to bring up more existential questions. Me and Dan-Erik Sahlberg have had talks for many years and they've been great. There's a different dude holding the talks this year, I don't know who, but generally speaking, everything that Se människan has arranged has been good. Then I'll be at Ordfront's exhibition stand too, for those who can't be bothered to pay the money it costs to go to the Book Fair. I don't get it, but... yes, I'm coming to the Book Fair.
00:36:15 Isn't there a short story in one of the collections where Oskar and Eli are seen from another character's perspective?
Yes, there is. It's called Let the Old Dreams Die and is in the short story collection of the same title. I think it's one of my better short stories to boot. So that's something you can read, and you get the answer to how things end up for Oskar and Eli, even though they're not at all the main characters. There are two completely different main characters. It's a love story, but not between the two of them. But you find out how things went for them. And then if you still have any questions, there's yet another short story called What Kept You So Long?, where you also find out a little bit about how things went. It was my response to what's been called the grooming theory in the film: that Eli is in reality only together with Oskar because she wants a new Håkan, she—Or he. No spoilers, multiple people haven't read it—in reality only wants a new human being who can fix an apartment and all the practical stuff surrounding living as a vampire in the real world.
And with Let Met In, that became even more apparent, in that Owen finds a film strip where you see Håkan—or whatever he's called in the American version—as a child together with Eli. But that was not at all my intention. The thought never even crossed my mind, not when I was writing the screenplay nor when I saw the finished film, that that was what people were going to think. After all, this was just love. Surely that's not what Eli is doing. And so I had to write a short story to give MY version. It's a completely reasonable idea, and who knows? I might've used it myself, but it never crossed my mind, because I just wanted for there to be this love story between those two. I think it's so beautiful when they're in bed together. Both in the book and even more so in the film. When Eli shows up, bloody around the mouth, and creeps into bed. "Får jag chans på dig?" It's one of my favorite scenes I've written. It was a while ago, but yeah.
00:38:35 For someone who doesn't write a lot down, there sure are a lot of sticky notes in the background.
Yes, there are. That's a for a novel called The Value, which I guess is the novel after the one after my next one. I need them because the structure is so fucked up. It's completely non-linear and is going to jump back and forth in time, so that you find out later why things turned out a certain way. For example, here we have a person whose ear has been burned off. Then 20 pages later there's a gas burner in the office that the main character uses to do this. And then maybe 40 pages after that, we get to find out why there's a gas burner in the office. These aren't actual things from the book, but there are... [leans back and looks at the sticky notes] "Gets flayed with electric planer", "Gets sawed in two", "Gets nailed on the head with a nail gun", and then fridge magnets gets put on those nails. It's an extremely disgusting story. I've written maybe 40 or 50 pages of it. I've mainly written a lot of death scenes that are really nasty, to the point where my wife, who can stand a lot and has started liking horror movies ever since we got together, has said that she doesn't want to hear any more. That's the way I like it.
00:40:10 In The Reality, regarding the fact that Heidi plays a role to entertain her audience, have you borrowed from your experience of being the author John Ajvide Lindqvist?
Nah. I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I'm sitting here now, in my "reality". Maybe I have, in some way. After all, you always borrow something of yourself to the characters. My big breakthrough when writing The Reality... I wrote 10 or 12 pages in third person, which unfortunately turned into satire. Pretty funny, but pure satire, and it didn't work. Then I got the idea to write Heidi in first person and to make her bright and intelligent. She's not a bimbo who just wants to perform for the cameras with her duckface, she's a bright and perceptive person who really suffers from the situation she's put herself in, and which she can't quite escape. She makes these futile escape attempts to get out of her "reality", but then of course, "that" has happened and shows that it's impossible. Like I said, I won't spoil the book, but "that" is a kind of screwed-up version of the reality that Heidi actually finds herself in, including as a normal person. But how much of that is me? I guess my thinking is that... I've tried to stick to my integrity and my privacy, and Heidi's situation is really a nightmare to me. It really is, on one level, writing about my own horror. To hand over your innermost being to the public eye in that way. I mean, to an extent that's what I'm sitting here and doing, but it's something I choose. So on some level, Heidi is me, in the sense that she represents a level of horror that I have. To not have control or possession of one's own life.
00:42:30 [in English] Any further word on the Handling the Undead movie? [Asked by danielmann861.]
Yeah, I do, but it's nothing I can talk about, unfortunately. But let's just say that it looks very promising. And it's... I mean, you can find this on the internet no problem, but it's directed by a fairly young, female Norwegian director who's made some great stuff. She's made a very strange feature film, she's made a lot of videos and a few short films. She has a visual language which is very much her own, Thea Hvistendahl. And I'm sure that she will make yet another completely different kind of horror movie, like Border and Let the Right One In. This is going to be something special. I can't tell yet if it's going to be a masterpiece, like more or less the other ones are, but I hope it will be and I'm confident there's a great chance it will be. But it will definitely be something special. A zombie movie like none before it.
00:44:20 [in Swedish] To what extent does nostalgia play a role in your novel writing?
Very good question. Quite a lot, I think. Not The Reality, but... to re-experience moods. When smells smelled more. When one didn't have as many preconceptions about life. When one's identity was not yet formed. To return to that state of consciousness, which is a kind of nostalgia. That definitely has significance. The novel I'm writing now, called The Summer of 1985, is... I mean, listen to the title. But maybe it'll be called The Darkness of the Summer of 1985. But it's about a fictional island called Särsö in the Stockholm Archipelago and a summer gang of friends who are 13 and 14 years old when the novel takes place. Three girls and four boys, who've always stuck together ever since they were little. What they do, and then something happens. I initially thought that this would be my counterpart to Stephen King's The Body/Stand By Me, but since then it's developed in a different direction. But it's VERY nostalgic. The opening lines are: "It was that summer. The summer of 1985. The Live Aid summer." And then I can use my own memories from the Live Aid summer, for [laughs] all the boomers watching this who know what Live Aid was. But there's half a page's worth of explanation of what Live Aid was. It was via SATELLITE. I remember that that was like "Wow". It was going to be done with a cable across the Atlantic, and syncing, and the SATELLITES. You pictured these giant artists you knew about like Bowie and Sting, and they were going to go up in a SATELLITE. Not in that way, but they were going to get sent up, and then boom, beamed down to our little village, our little television, via the SATELLITE. "Wow! We're experiencing something! Something is happening!"
00:46:55 Why was The Brothers Lionheart never made?
Well... There are many reasons. Let us say that the short version is that it got too big. There was going to be too much money in it. American money. English money. A buttload of money. It was going to be by far the most expensive Swedish movie ever made, though I think it was going to be shot in northern Norway. People get nervous when a lot of money is involved. People have a lot of opinions. People want clauses in their contracts, which some of the other people involved might not be able to agree to. And then it might take half a year to get out of these contracts, and then you have to find a new lead producer... It's pure technicalities. It's not that Tomas Alfredson's brain stopped working or anything. In many ways it's something of a sad story that I sadly can't get into further. But my screenplay was good. I don't think it would've left a single eye dry. I had added and subtracted and developed various things [from the book].
00:48:30 Are you going to write a book that isn't a pure horror book?
The Kindness isn't a pure horror book. Not at all. There are many real horror fans who are disappointed by it, or who think that I have gotten too soft in general. But like I said, The Value and The Pigs are coming! The Pigs is another book, but that one's finished. It's only 80 pages long. It's about the dansband Tropicos, who've shown up in several of my stories. They're playing disinterestedly at the opening of a shopping mall, and then their tour bus gets hijacked by two pig farmers, a brother and sister who have plans for Tropicos. But no, I don't have any such plans. But I've written Alternative Facts About Birds, that one isn't horror. I've written a children's book, Sulky och Bebbe regerar okej. Both of them together with my wife, who's made the illustrations. No horror in either of those, even if there is a chapter in Sulky och Bebbe called "Sulky and Bebbe meet Death". [laughs] But they also meet God, the mountain, the king, lots of people. They meet the man with the head under his arm too. But it's not horror, it's for children.
00:50:15 Best horror author?
I would say Clive Barker. I've read a ton of Stephen King. I think he's made a few top-notch ones even in recent years. I thought Finders Keepers was great, really back to form. I do think he's written a number of novels that would've been better as novellas. They feel very drawn out and have a lot of parts where you just hang out with the main characters. Admittedly, Stephen King is very good at fluff, where you just hang out with the main character for 20 or 30 pages that don't add anything to the plot. You're just there. And he pulls that off so bloody well. But with that said... Clive Barker is my big favorite, but he's not very productive any more. But then I read, and even wrote a blurb which I almost never do, for the Argentinian author Mariana Enríquez's book Nuestra parte de noche, which might be the best horror novel I've read. Ever. Came out a year or so ago in Swedish. Just the fact that they translated a 500+ page Argentinian book to Swedish. It's fantastic. I can warmly recommend it.
00:51:45 Which of your other books would you want to see as a film?
Well, I have a 4-hour TV screenplay for Little Star, and I think that's still my best book. So whoever dares to take that on... and there are some plans or thoughts around doing that. There's also stuff around a short story I wrote called Eternal/Love. Another thing that's properly in progress is an original screenplay, not a book, called The World Council of Magic, where all the main characters are between 75 and 80 years old. But otherwise... no, it's Little Star that I'd like to see. It would be cool if that could be pulled off.
00:52:40 I've watched the movie Border but thought the plot and movie seemed so weird. What tips can you give if one is interested in starting to read the book?
[laughs] I don't know. An open mind? It's not that weird, is it? It's more that Tina and Vore look very weird, but there's a reason for that. I think it's a wonderful film. The whole pedophile ring subplot wasn't in my screenplay. It's implied in the short story, but it has a bigger role in the film. It wasn't mine, but I realized that there needed to be that kind of driving plot element.
00:53:35 How's The Value coming along?
It's going great, it's just that I have so many other things to do. It's so bloody complicated. People who like more hardcore horror might like it, since the plot is so horrific, but many other people are going to be scared off by the fact that it's so horrible. It's really not a The Kindness. And then those who are hardcore horror fans and really want this disgusting splatter are going to be scared off by the fact that the time structure is completely insane. So in the end, maybe two people total are going to want to read it. And it's really difficult to write to boot. But I'm making progress.
00:54:30 Favorite book by King?
The Dead Zone. I also think Cronenberg's film is great. I'm very fond of Christopher Walken.
00:55:00 When is The Pigs coming out? Would really like to see pure splatter written by you.
My plan is that, since it's only 80 pages and The Value might end up being 200, they're going to be released together under the name The Pigs and the Value, which is a pretty good title in and of itself. I just have to finish The Value, but that'll take a few years. Or actually, I'll be working on The Value in August. I have a plan concerning other books and other things in-between, but I have 5 or 6 weeks in August where I'll be working on The Value. So I'm not letting it go. It's beautiful stuff. Haha, not at all, it's real ugly stuff, but still.
00:55:50 Favorite Morrissey?
There's only one as far as I know, but, uh... We can include The Smiths too, right? I'm very fond of How Soon is Now?. Hm... nah, I'm so bloody simple, I'm sorry, but There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. I'm sorry. It's that simple. However, I was very fond of Blue Dreamer's Eyes, which isn't even available on any album and was just released as a demo or something. I listened to it a lot during one period. I think it's really beautiful. I remember that it was in connection to the release of the movie Border when we lived in a hotel room, and I listened to that song over and over again to get in the right mood. "Still I look at the world through blue dreamer's eyes..." I'm very fond of that one, so there's a slightly more obscure answer, at least.
00:57:00 Love the language you use in The Reality. How much comes naturally in the moment and how much do you polish the drafts?
Very little. I mostly remove words when I edit.
Someone in the chat asks what Swedish bands or music I like. Håkan Hellström. A hell of a lot.
Anyway: no, I don't do much about the language after the fact. Sometimes I can notice that there are words that sound similar or the same word located too close together in two sentences or that I've reused half a phrase and it feels very samey... so no, I don't change it much afterward at all.
Someone in the chat says that Harbour is their favorite book. Thank you. It was my mother's favorite book, too. It's the one I usually recommend to people who think I write things that are too scary. Then I say:
"I don't always, you can read Harbour. Do you like The Smiths?"
"Yes I do!"
"In that case you should read it."
When is Harbour being made into a movie? Well, me and Tomas Alfredson were working on that a very long time ago, but no, that isn't planned anymore, unfortunately. As far as I know! Maybe we'll pick it up again.
00:58:20 Is it a "V" trilogy with Vänligheten and Verkligheten?
No, Vänligheten, Verkligheten, Värdet [The Kindness, The Reality, The Value] have nothing to do with each other. It might be a bit misleading that their names are so similar, but they're completely separate. On the other hand, I Am Behind You, I Always Find You, I Am the Tiger is a trilogy, which I've seen a lot of people miss. It means that a lot of people react to I Am Behind You with: "What happened? What kind of ending is this?" when the story is supposed to continue. Or if you start by reading I Am the Tiger: "Where did all this come from?" So we'll see, there might be a special edition in the future including all three. A really fat paperback simply titled The Places. And then I'll try to write Sigge as well, the short story that concludes it all. For those who've read I Am the Tiger, there is a very radical or you might say explosive ending, but Sigge has bigger plans than that. This is only part of something else.
01:00:25 Did you do any research about Spiritus for Harbour, and if so, where did you find sources?
There is a book I return to every now and then and flip through, Swedish Folktales by Bengt af Klintberg. It was from there I picked up the basics of Spiritus, but then I of course changed it into something else. Spiritus was a kind of magical creature you were supposed to use. I'm not sure that it was even a worm; it was a bit unclear what kind of creature it was. The thing I found enticing was that you'd give it saliva to keep it alive and keep having good luck or money or whatever Spiritus could give. And I specifically liked that detail and included it, but then there are a lot of things about it that are different.
01:01:30 [in English] Have you ever read Junji Ito's manga comics?
Yeah, sure. I'm reading Shattered at the moment, which is a lot of short stories, in graphic form of course. And I mean, he's a genius. I've of course also read Spirals and Gyo.
I mean, what a complete failure [the cancellation of Silent Hills was]. Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro, and him. I mean, what might've been of that. Some of you might've played Playable Teaser. I've only seen a video of it. It looked fabulous.
So yeah, I've read Junji Ito. Not all of it, but quite a few. He's one of the few people who can actually make drawings or comics that I find genuinely disturbing. So yeah, he's a wonderful writer.
01:02:50 [in Swedish] Do you often start with the monster when writing a book? How important is the monster to the story?
That varies so much. I can start with so very many different things. Like in The Reality, where I only had one image. In Little Star, the massacre at Sing-Along at Skansen was something I wrote pretty early in the process just to establish where it was headed. In that case you could say that the massacre is the monster. When I started making up Let the Right One In, for example, I initially didn't even know that it was a vampire. I just knew that something from the other side was going to come to Blackeberg to see how people would react. Then I realized that a vampire was the best monster. In Handling the Undead, I of course knew that it'd be zombies. But monsters... have I made up any real good monsters? Actually, yes, I think the black slime in the bathtub in I Always Find You that lets people travel to the Field, if you call that a monster, is a pretty original monster. I mentioned Nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enríquez earlier, and something I think is fantastic about that one is that it comes up with a completely new monster and mythology that I've never seen anywhere else. You often glance at H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos if you want to have a big existential monster, the idiot god that's behind it all, but Mariana Enríquez has managed to do something completely new, and not many have that privilege.
01:04:55 When is Harbour being made into a movie?
Right, I answered this one earlier. You never know. There's generally a lot of stuff happening for film, TV... theater. I mean, I don't know how many Let the Right One In stage plays have been made around the world at this point. It's insane. I think it's even being made into a musical in South Korea. [wheezing laughter] And they're working on an American TV series that's based on it in some way, but also one in Korea. It's very strange, the whole thing. There's a lot of things like that happening, it takes a lot of time. I think I have discipline in that sense. I manage to avoid getting too busy, and isolate the writing.
01:06:05 Fulet was a great play.
Yes, it turned out great. It was on TV and everything. It was well done. That was based on a short story I wrote for Färdlektyr, a little pamphlet with short stories that was given out by the Stockholm Local Transit Company to all ninth-graders. I thought it was too dark and pennalistic and disturbing, so I wrote a story called Tjejen instead. Then, much later, Galago asked if I had any short story lying around, which I did, and then it ended up being very appreciated. I know it's used in schools and such, in anthologies that students get to read, since it's fitting.
01:07:00
Someone asked about Elden Ring. No, not yet. Me and my wife are busy with It Takes Two, which I can also warmly recommend to those who like couch co-op, meaning that you sit next to each other and help each other complete a game. There is far too little of that. We've played Baldur's Gate, Diablo... but I can warmly recommend It Takes Two, which is made by Josef Fares' company, to everyone who plays video games. It's really fun and really cute.
01:07:30
Someone's asking if I'm going to see Firestarter. Maybe. We'll see. I'm not someone who goes to see everything with horror in it.
01:07:45
There will probably be another short story collection in the future. I have around 200 or 220 pages' worth of short stories that I've written for different anthologies, magazines, other countries... So it's coming. There needs to be over 300 at least, otherwise it's a bit too... There has to be a proper amount of stories in order to be a nice collection, so I need to write a few more. I started writing The Summer of 1985 for that reason, but then it turned into a whole novel.
01:09:20 [in English] Have you ever considered visiting the U.S.?
[in Swedish] I don't travel a lot anymore due to flygskam, not to mention that we go to Cuba two months and Sicily a week every year, and that'll have to be enough flying, generally speaking. If I get an invitation to the musical in South Korea, then who the hell knows. [laughs] I don't know. Maybe then I'd have to swallow the shame.
01:09:55
Alright, thank you all for joining in and asking questions. I can't hear you, I can't see you. You're all just letters on the screen and little pictures. But thanks for being here. It won't be too long until the next book comes out. It's finished. It's a crime novel. [waves] Goodbye.
I actually thought there may have been more than that. Some of it I could make out and sort of time just because some of the words seemed clear enough but I wasn't sure as a whole.
but yeah I gathered it wouldn't be 100% in sync. Still, I have the save file so I could easily go and fix it up based on those corrections.