Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindquist (St Martins Griffin, 2008)

John Lindquist’s Let The Right One In is a breath of fresh vampire air in an oversaturated mythos. Set in a Swedish suburb in 1982, Blackeberg is “not a place that developed organically…everything was carefully planned from the outset.” Peopled with alcoholics, absentee parents, and schoolyard bullies, Blackeberg is a town where hope goes to die. The relentless cold grayness of winter in Sweden heightens the isolation of the characters. These are Thoreau’s people, living lives of quiet desperation. Let The Right One In rises above the horror genre in its sympathetic, yet unflinching, exploration of victimization in all its aspects.

Twelve year-old Oskar is a victim. School is a daily gauntlet Oskar runs to avoid Jonny, the bully who calls him “Piggy” and forces him to squeal and grunt before shoving his head in the toilet. At home, Oskar enjoys a vivid and violent fantasy life, stabbing trees that stand in for his schoolyard torturers. In the middle of the night, a girl and her guardian move into Oskar’s building. Twelve year-old Eli doesn’t go to school. In fact, she only comes out of her apartment at night. She smells like death, and she is completely unaffected by the winter cold. The two outsiders begin a friendship that turns into a love story.

Lindquist’s vampire is a far cry from Murnau’s repugnant Nosferatu, or the brooding beauties of the Twilight series. Twelve year-old Eli is not a blasphemy like Nosferatu, crosses and holy water do not burn her. She is a victim who survives. Her humanity is stolen in rituals that are only revealed in fragments of dream. Like the town of Blackeberg, she did not develop organically. She has been taken out of the natural order, recreated as a predator of those who were her own kind. But unlike most modern vampire tales, Lindquist does not force his creation, or his readers, to suffer through page after page of self-loathing. Eli is simply what she was made to be. Eli’s guardian, Hakan, is a pedophile who murders for Eli in the hopes that Eli will return his love. But Hakan also uses his position as procurer as a weapon, sometimes starving Eli to force her into physical acts of the love she denies him.

In the end, Hakan’s devotion to Eli prompts him to disfigure himself, when a murder goes wrong, so that the police are not led to Eli’s door. Lindquist does not take the easy way out in his portrait of Hakan. He is not a one-dimensional monster. He is a man filled with self-loathing, both for his role as murderer and as pedophile. He grieves for his life before Eli. Lindquist’s sympathetic handling of even this vilest of human monsters characterizes what takes this book out of genre and places it squarely in the category of damn good fiction.

Human monsters abound in Blackeberg. Hakan, Jonny the bully, and Tommy the fence are just some of the worst. The aimless alcoholics who hang out at a local Chinese restaurant, the teachers who offer Oskar no respite from his tormenters, and his alcoholic and helpless father make it easy to see why Oskar and Eli turn to each other for comfort. They have no one else. Their love brings them a certain dark salvation and freedom from isolation and victimization. The ending is as happy as vengeance and vampires can make it.