John Ajvide Lindqvist
Lasciami Entrare

I believe it is almost impossible to write a decent horror story. There are too many clichés, the "themes" are always the same, the plots identical, the ideas almost always recycled. Yet there are various ways to recycle, this novel by the Swedish author Lindqvist seems to tell us.

Let the Right One In is a vampire story, a love story between a vampire and a human (how original, you might say, Twilight with an Ikea touch) and it plays on the cliché that even the most unlucky outcast can snare a super vampire (another old myth you might repeat to yourselves). But no, Let the Right One In is different. Why? First of all, because the protagonists are two children, which infuses their eerie meeting with tenderness, an element completely foreign to horror. Then, another incredible element for a horror book, this book exudes Sweden, Sweden in the early 1980s. So there's not only Ikea, there is also bullying and pedophilia (the main characters are, after all, two children), but there's also alcoholism and unemployment, all the cracks of a nation that from the outside seems perfect to us. Furthermore, Lindqvist sets the story in Blackeberg, a district of Stockholm he knows very well, having spent his childhood there in the early '80s. To this, add the fact that the bloody events of the story are based on a series of actual crimes (only "in a different way") committed in Lindqvist's neighborhood in the winter of 1981 when he was 13 years old, exactly like the protagonists. This gives the sequence of events a structural solidity usually lacking in horror stories.
Lindqvist's prose then is undeniably good (that tendency to skip pages remains, but so be it), not to mention the myriad of references to Dante, Shakespeare, Swedish poets, comics, and various rock bands (the title is taken from a Morrissey song).

But the true strength of the tale is the infinite number of perspectives from which the story is framed. The predominant viewpoints are those of the two protagonists, however, the story is also framed from the perspective of at least 7 main characters, plus the extras who drive the story once and then never return. This spectacular alternation of perspectives creates incredible suspense.
Last but not least, this book has an open ending.
8.0