the entropy tango

Here are the lithographic illustrations by Charles Keeping…

Again, not many new book covers do it for me – but this one drew me in…

Okay, I’ve also just finished Let the Right One In by a Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. I don’t normally read contemporary horror, as I’m not a fan of vampire hunting goth erotica or so called ‘dark’ fantasies; however this one pulled me in: its kind of a Ken Loach-esque vampire horror novel about a bullied boy and his friendship with a 200 year old vampiric 12 year old girl who moves next-door to him. Personally one of the constant things that pisses me off about horror fiction (and fiction in general in fairness) is its focus on the middle classes. There are so few books out there that put the spot light on us poor proles. Instead of the Stephen King-esque formula: lovely middle class family Vs. ancient evil, Let the Right One In puts the horror in a shitty council-estate full of shambling alcoholics, sexual abuse and violence. How much worse is the horror when you don’t have a Volvo to bugger off in! And it is here that the novel works well: coupling social realism of poverty with traditional horror. Unfortunately this only lasts for the first highly intriguing 200 pages (about 500 pages in total) then it tries to crank up the horror and pace, which doesn’t really work so well. For a start, the prose style (or it could be the translation) is lacks real emotional resonance which is fine in the early stages where urban alienation is the horror, but when Lindqvist tries to crank up the drama from implied to physical it feels leaden. I couldn’t help but think that a Dan Simmons would have done a better job at building the tension and dropping the odd cliff hanger. Importantly once the gore builds up, Lindqvist doesn’t appear to know what to do with it and it kind of fizzles out… I guess the problem is that the social-horror really is much harder to deal with than the undead variety…

Secondly I’m a little bored of the multi-character driven narratives in contemporary fiction these days. It seems that modern authors can’t write anything with out having the perspective flipped from the main protagonist, to the antagonist, to the milk man, to his maiden-aunt and to some mould under the sink… Now don’t get me wrong, this approach can be fine and dandy much of the time, but Let the Right One In promised (to me) to be an intimate and insular story, not a high-octane thriller. There must have been at least a dozen perspectives during the book, none of which added anything to what I percieve as the real story. Of course the author has then felt the need to weave in many sub-plots to justify their existence in the novel – which could be fine yet ultimately none of them really add anything to the novel and I felt that the extra character perspectives were there more to pad out another 150 pages than to add to the story or the horror.

There’s also the problem that little of what was so intriguing in the first couple of hundred pages is greatly expanded upon later. Yep, we do find out a bit about the vampire’s past, and yes there is a twist, yet the connotations of the twist just aren’t expanded upon, which is a missed opportunity and, ultimately, confussing.

Sounds like I’m slagging off this novel too, but I’m not. No, really I liked it (this is just me liking something). It really is a very good, if slightly disappointing novel, especially seeing as it is a début. Even the full on horror bits were okay, just not great. It’s just I had high hopes that it could have been so much more… a kind of highbrow socio-horror lit hybrid, instead of the action-orientated horror it turns into. I’m probably guilty of having too high expectations and I’ll certainly read something else by this author sometime and I certainly hope to see more horror novels that couple real horrors with supernatural ones in a setting that isn’t Middle-England/America.