Books – John Lindqvist’s “Let the Right One In”
by chris ~ May 26th, 2009. Filed under: Books.
Let the Right One In: A Novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like many Americans, I saw the movie version of Let the Right One In before reading the book, and enjoyed it quite a bit. This led me to pursue the book and, as is almost always the case for me, I liked it even more than the film. For the most part, I think the film made good cuts, and it retains the overall plot/theme very well, but it’s hard to put as much depth into a two hour movie as one can put into a five-hundred page book.
Many of the more minor characters (and one central one – Hakan) are much more fleshed out than they were in the film. There are more sub-plots and we learn a great deal more about Eli’s past, though great chunks of it are still left in the dark. We also learn the full truth about Eli’s sexuality and some rather disturbing information about the vampire mechanism works (turns out there’s good reason to destroy the heart).
I’ve read a great many vampire novels and short stories in my life, and this is one of the better ones. It finds interesting twists on old legends and presents us with believable, morally ambiguous characters. No one in this book is exactly good, or exactly evil. They’re all flawed, like real humans, and like real humans, they’re all trying to survive.
Two things kept this from being a five-star book for me. First, while I thought it was enjoyable and extremely readable (I tore through it over the course of two days), I found it in some ways less moving than the film. This was probably due in part to the film’s two child leads, who were incredible, but also partly because of the other reason I knocked off a star: the book seems to fizzle at the end just a bit. Things are wrapped up a little too quickly, especially amongst some of the minor characters. Additionally, there seems to be less of a sense of love between Oskar and Eli than there was in the film, which I felt was important in establishing why the story ends as it does.
Overall, though, a very enjoyable book. Lindqvist’s book is more interesting, more atmospheric, and more original than the vast majority of commercial vampire fiction. Give it a read.
