Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Christine - Stephen King

I read Christine for the first time in high school and hadn’t picked it up since then. I’ve reread most of King’s books at least once since that time, and I’m not sure why Christine was one of the few I didn’t get around to. It’s a good book, classic King, full of quotidian details and bullies with switchblades and supernatural evil lurking at the fringes, operating at a level never fully explained but sufficiently realized to function within the universe of the story.

The book is constructed in an unusual way, opening and closing in first person with an extended stretch of third-person in the middle. Our narrator for the bookends is Dennis, friend of the bright, bespectacled, and perennially unpopular Arnie Cunningham, who is both the tragic hero and villain of the story. Arnie spots an aging Plymouth Fury up on blocks and is instantly smitten—or perhaps ensnared is a better word. He buys it from a crusty old coot named Roland LeBay, who dies shortly thereafter, and sets to fixing it up. As he works on the car—making impressive if desultory strides in the repair—his personality begins to change, aping the mannerisms of the late LeBay. Dennis is distrustful of the car and feels his relationship with Arnie start to slip.

Meanwhile, Arnie gets a girlfriend, who hates the car as much as Dennis does. The inevitable dirtbag bully crosses him and meets a violent end. A police officer grows suspicious and eventually dies as well. Dennis and Leigh both struggle to believe what is right in front of them, against the frantic struggle of their rational minds: Christine is alive, or possessed of LeBay’s malign spirit, or both (I was never entirely clear), and must be destroyed before it’s jealousy turns on them.

Christine is a good pulpy story elevated by King’s knack for dialogue and character, and his ability to nest outlandish tales in worlds made believable by small details. There is always room to breathe in a King story, and these moments of minutia, which a lesser writer might cut to torque up the action, have always been his greatest strength.

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).

People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.

Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.

The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.

Or at least, it should be.

If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.

I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.

Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Bag of Bones was the new King novel when I started reading him in earnest. I don’t think I got to it until high school, but I recall thinking of it as a milestone of sorts in his work, in which supernatural terrors took a backseat to more psychological fears. In truth, it’s not quite that tidy, as books like Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are clear antecedents, and Dreamcatcher, published just three years later, is classic King. Still, on rereading, I think there is a distinct maturity in Bag of Bones regarding how King went about writing novels, an increased reflection and willingness to let the narrative breathe.

Bag of Bones is billed as a ghost story, and it is, but the spirits take a back seat for much of the novel and, in truth, are the weakest part of the book. The story of Sara Tidwell is well-told and shockingly brutal in its depiction of racial violence, but the latter portion involving the storm felt like a tonal shift and a way to up the tension that had been building much more subtly before that. Really, Bag of Bones is a book about grief, and a grief of a particular sort, where a person loses the partner they meant to spend their life with and finds, with no small amount of despair, that they now have to find a way to spend it alone.

King, about 20 years married at the time of the book’s writing, writes marriage well, cutting past the saccharine hallmark pablum on one side and the hackneyed discord on the other to find a complex, beating core that is truer than most “literary fiction” I’ve read. It is this talent, I think, that separates King from his peers. The man can write a thriller with the best of them, but he populates those taut tales with real, richly evoked people. No one feels like a cog in a Stephen King novel, and you could easily imagine following a side character off the page and into their daily life.

The Dark Half - Stephen King

The Dark Half is the first Stephen King book I read from start to finish. I’d attempted two others previously, It and The Talisman, but was bested by my young age and their prodigious length (I’d chosen, unwisely, two of the chunkier entries into King’s notoriously chunky bibliography).

As a result, I’ve always held a certain affection for The Dark Half, even though I hadn’t reread it until now (nearly twenty-five years later, Jesus) and could clearly recall only two specific things about it beyond the general plot. The first was the improbable and gustatorily unsatisfactory position of a victim’s male member upon discovery of his body (Google it at your peril), and the second was a character (I couldn’t remember who) having a picture of Ronald Reagan on their dartboard. I can see why the first one stuck with me, as it was likely the most gruesome thing I’d ever read to date at that point, but why I hung onto the Reagan thing I have no idea. Especially since the book’s climax contains one of the more striking images in King’s canon: a living corpse borne aloft by a cloak of sparrows and carted screaming to hell. Seems like the sort of thing that would grab my attention, but I didn’t remember it at all.

The lead character is named Thad Beaumont, and he’s the archetype of a King protagonist if ever there was one. He’s a successful writer (check) from Maine (check) with a family (check) who stuck with him through bouts of alcoholism and anger issues (check) and who also teaches English at a local college (check). King writes well enough that this tendency never bothered me much, but I can’t deny that it’s there, especially in much of his 80s-90s work.

The twist (and perhaps the first early nod to the metatextuality that would consume much of the later Dark Tower books) is that Thad achieved most of his commercial success not as himself, but as his pen name, George Stark. A snooping fan outs That as Stark, and in order to get ahead of the story Thad admits everything and stages a “funeral” for the late George Stark. Only George decides he doesn’t like being dead, and opts instead to come to life, rising from his staged grave to wreak havoc on those who outed him, and to persuade Thad through less-than-subtle means to collaborate with him on a final book.

Pulpy stuff, but King does pulp to a high art, in large part through his characters, who I’d argue are richer than truer than many inhabitants of so-called literary fiction. The best one here is Alan Pangborn, a small town sheriff with big city instincts who proves the first bit of the mettle that will be more fully on display in his star turn a few years later, Needful Things.

I love King, and even his more forgotten works are always a pleasure to reread. This may not be his best, but it’s a solid turn.

Needful Things - Stephen King

I’ve been half-finishing a lot of books lately, which is why there’s such a large gap between entries. My choices weren’t bad books, but were a little too demanding for my frame of mind. I needed something I could sink into easily, and for that Stephen King is always a good choice.

I last read Needful Things in high school, so my memory of it was spotty. A few brief scenes remained clear to me—the fatal duel between Nettie and Wilma, the thing in Polly’s azka, and the encounter between Sherriff Pangborn and Leland Gaunt—but beyond that I could really only recall the general plot: a new store called Needful Things opens in Castle Rock, selling objects that entrance the townsfolk. I’d forgotten about the pranks, which Gaunt extracts from buyers as an additional payment in an effort to play the townspeople off of each other and stoke ill feeling.

It’s a classic King story, with a compelling villain, strong flawed heroes, and an undergirding magic that is never fully explained but feels earned by the premise of the story. It also includes a fair bit of what I think is King’s strongest trait: his ability to conjure a deep sense of community between his characters. His books never drag, even when they spend whole chapters on seemingly prosaic matters unrelated to the main story. His characters feel real, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time with them, even the unpleasant ones. There is something entrancingly human about them.

Picking up Needful Things got me in a mind to reread some of the other Castle Rock stories, as that particular intertextual universe of his hasn’t drawn me back as often as some others (the Dark Tower, for one). There’s something homey a Stephen King book (an odd thing, maybe, considering he’s known as a horror writer). It’s comforting to know I can always come back to them.

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in a larger collection of Shirley Jackson’s work, and while I enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by We Have Always Lived In the Castle, Jackson’s greatest work and, to my eyes, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century literature. But Hill House really is an excellent book, and I was happy to revisit unhappy Eleanor as she undergoes her strange symbiosis with the eponymous building. For that’s how I always interpreted the book: the house found her and knew her for its own and, through its designs, kept her.

Eleanor is masterfully rendered in this book. Jackson creates remarkable characters, but Eleanor may be her crowning achievement, even more than Merricat Blackwood (though Merricat will always be my favourite). Broken by the toil and slow cruelty of an unhappy childhood cap-stoned by her years as her mother’s nursemaid—details revealed only in secondhand snippets, but precise and vivid enough to undergird a novel all their own—Eleanor tumbles from subservience to her mother to subservience to her sister. A letter from Dr. Montague inviting her to participate in a study of the paranormal gives her a chance to escape, and she snatches it with wild abandon.

In a lesser book, Montague would be the villain, his purposes for drawing disparate characters to Hill House convoluted and sinister. But he is actually a sympathetic man struggling to unite the spiritual and empiricist halves of his mind, a longstanding battle that informs his particular, idiosyncratic fascination with the paranormal. The glamorous Theodora, very much a mirror opposite of Eleanor, is the only other invitee to arrive, apart from Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner who is foisted off to keep him out of trouble. The fact that he actually doesn’t need such keeping is another detail a lesser writer would have missed.

Jackson’s characters are not broad. They are complex and troubled and hard to pin down. They bounce form camaraderie to conflict with such rapidity that it can feel shocking, but it all feels earned and natural. There are hints that the house may be manipulating them, but the extent of this is never clear. Even the actions of the ghost—if indeed there is a ghost; I tend to think the spirit is the house itself, birthed in trauma, rather than restless human soul—are opaque despite being realized in great detail (the cold spot is a nice touch, and the phantom hand Eleanor holds in an imagined darkness is one of the sharpest scenes in any horror book). Jackson draws few signposts, and the reader can infer to the best of their ability what exactly causes the final tragic events to unfold.

A neat parallel to We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the arrival of Dr. Montague’s wife, whose pigheaded spiritualism clashes with his own more nuanced take, causing a disruption in line with that of Merricat’s cousin in the later book. Their relationship is magnificently rendered, frosty without any of the cliches that mar depictions of martial strife in many other stories.

Shirley Jackson is one of America’s greatest writers. Had she not somehow excelled herself with Castle, Hill House would be her magnum opus. Any author would be proud to have such a book as their best work. The fact it is only number 2 speaks to her tremendous talent.

If it Bleeds - Stephen King

For a writer famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for penning novels with four digit page numbers, Stephen King has always been remarkably good at novellas. If It Bleeds collects four of them, all previously unpublished. They’re a diverse lot, but consistent in quality, and in a broader theme of morality and hard decisions.

Mr Harrigan’s Phone is classic King, and of the four feels the most like one of his old short stories—tales where an ordinary person brushes up against dark forces he can’t quite understand, and backs away form them unbroken but changed. king metes out tough justice, which I’ve always appreciated, and you can’t help rooting for Harrigan even if, as the narrator does, you feel a little ill at ease with the consequences of his powers.

The Life of Chuck is, arguably, the most experimental story King has ever written, and a good rebuff to critics who brush off his writing as lackign literary merit. I’ve always pushed back at this assumption, as King, while no stranger to the potboiler plot, writes real people, not cardboard cutouts, and rich themes invaraibly thrum beneath the pulpy action on the surface of the page. Here those themes are given more spotlight, but still anchored enough to character to avoid feeling showy, as if it were some vanity project to prove his literary chops. The plot is hard to describe—its actually more like three different, each humming their own note to make a sad, autumnal chord—but gets to the notion that there is in each of us a world, perhaps a universe.

If It Bleeds steals the show, as was obviously intended—the collection’s not called Life of Chuck, after all—thanks to the welcome presense of Holly Gibney. With Castle Rock, Giliead, and the dark townships of Derry largely pushed aside, King has very ably built a new world through hir David Hodge novels, which have spilled beyond the initial trilogy into other works, notably The Outsider. This story plays as a kind of sequel to that one, with another shapechanger on the loose, which Holly must track down and destroy. The action is slow to build, giving the story lots of breathing room where King can show his strengths in building relationships between characters. It has always bee nthese, more than fantastic creatures or outrageous landscapes, that have formed the firmest foundation of King’s worlds.

Rat finishes the collection. It’s another troubled writer story, and while this is not my favourite King mode, I must admit this story held me with its excellent use of mood. Doom builds like a fever before breaking in a turn of events that it both jarring and graceful, offering a glimpse into King’s assessment of the creative process, and the old notion of writers as mediums for a distant and ghostly place, where spirits give gifts that always have strings attached. And at least this time we’re granted a semi-supernatural reason why every King character farts out bestsellers.

A solid collection, and evidence of King in top form.

The Collected Fantasies Vol 1: The End of the Story - Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith is not a name I’d come across until recently. Though he is widely regarded as one of the three biggest voices to emerge from the Weird Fiction world of 1930s pulps, alongside Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, I would argue he has become the most obscure of the three. None of his works have received the major motion picture treatment, nor do any of his characters or stories have the universal name recognition of a Conan or a Cthulhu.

The reason for this may be that, unlike Lovecraft and Howard, who focussed the bulk of their talents and energy on short fiction, Smith was a poet above all, and seemed to consider prose writing as a side project of sorts, somethign to help pay the bills. It was, however, a very fruitful side project, since he wrote and published well over a hundred short stories in his lifetime, with 53 of them published in the seminal journal Weird Tales alone. (By comparison, Lovecraft, widely seen as the author of a sizable canon, wrote only 65 stories total).

Comparisons with Lovecraft are inevitable, and would not have been ill-received by the author—the two were friends and mutual admirers—but it is a gross oversimplication to call Smith’s work Lovecraftian. For one thing, he covered a much wider range of genres than Lovecraft, who dabbled in satire and fantasy on a couple of occasions, but for most of his literary career remained firmly fixed in the horror camp, veering only between cosmic and terrestrial strains.

Smith, on the other hand, wrote stories of high fantasy that hewed closer to Fritz Leiber or Robert E Howard, as well as sci-fi of a Bradburian or Vancian bent. Whiel certainly he favored plot over characters, as did Lovecraft, Smith’s creations are more full-blooded, bespeaking a greater comfort and familiarity with humanity than the perennial misfit Lovecraft ever managed (though Smith’s dialogue could be as stilted as Lovecraft’s at times, a fact that is so ubiquitous among pulps it seems more like a stylistic choice than a defect). Romance also gets more mileage in Smith’s writing, with characters professing love for one another and engaging in canoodling that, while hardly enough to go toe-to-toe with Tropic of Cancer, goes far beyond anything I remember from Lovecraft.

Smith is most regarded now for his prose style, rather than his stories, and it does bear a pleasing grandiloquence, though I think Lovecraft gets short shrift in this regard, since he too could cobble together gravity-defying towers of archaism-stuffed csubclauses that imporbably remained aloft. I enjoyed Smith’s writing now, but I would have absolutely loved it at 20, when my passion for earnest if strained metaphor had reached full flower (probably better I didn’t find it until late,r though; it would only have spurred on my worst impulses)

All told, Smith’s stories were a good find, and I intend to track down the second volume soon, Eventually, i suspect I’ll get all of them.

The Complete Fiction of HP Lovecraft - HP Lovecraft

I read this book in two chunks a year and a half apart, so my recollection of it varies a bit. I ordered it shortly after the birth of my son—read into that what you will—and made it through half before taking a break. I came back to it last month and finished the rest.

Though a writer principally of short stories and novellas—only the Case of Charles Dexter Ward is commonly classified as a novel, and even that has a novella-like feel—there is nevertheless in Lovecraft’s work sufficient through-line, both in plot and theme, that make much of his oeuvre feel like a single extended work. There actually is some tonal variety, especially in his earlier pieces, including some surprising satiric turns that I wouldn’t have expected, but as his Mythos grows so too does its hold on his fiction, until just about every story could be seen as a new facet of some multi-sided nightmare gem.

Characters in Lovecraft stories inevitably glimpse beyond the gossamer curtain of supposed reality and pay heavily for the act, either in their sanity or with their lives, and yet there is something in his writing that keeps this fairly repetitive approach from feeling formulaic or stale. I suspect this is the sheer richness of his imagination, for while the outcome may be familiar, the varied and troubling methods in which it does never cease to interest me. I also appreciate the secondary theme, less ocnstant but still recurrent, of tainted bloodlines, which I can’t help but feel says something about Lovecraft’s view of his own lineage. Perhaps that’s cheap psychoanalysing, but considering his well-documented racism and obsession with the past, there seems to be in him some lurking fear of a darkness folded in the backmost crannies of his genes.

Lovecraft is sometimes mocked for his prose, which can get a little overwrought at times, but for the most part I think his style suits the story, and lends a grandeur to the Mythos that simpler prose couldn’t match, His characters, for sure, are cardboard, but this feels less like a flaw than simple disinterest. Its the events themselves that form the focus of his story, not the person they are happening to. Though he may be an acquired taste, his impact on horror and science fiction can’t be denied, and his works remain among my favourites in the genre.

The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

They always say you should write what you know, but The King In Yellow is a great example of why that is, in certain cases, terrible advice.

A book of ten short stories published at the end of the 19th century, The King In Yellow opens with a suite of tales that would help mold weird and macabre fiction for decades to come. Lovecraft read them. Bram Stoker read them. Even if they aren't remembered directly by that many readers, their impact is palpable.

The first story in particular, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a force to be reckoned with. It reminded me a little of Phillip K Dick, not in style or content, but it the sheer overflowing of ideas. It takes place in an imagined future 1920s, but rather than making the setting the focus of the plot, it is almost incidental. It is in this story that we first hear mention of the eponymous King in Yellow, a play of such rhetorical power that reading it drives people mad (its influence as a literary device on Lovecraft's Necronomicon is indisputable). But this, too, is not truly core to the plot, which hinges on an unreliable narrator and his relationship with an eccentric old hermit, who has cast him in a atrangexdelusion of American dynasties.

The next three stories all share a common mythos despite varying in setting and style somewhat, and the first half rounds out with a ghost story that, while not especially original, is still engaging and well told.

It's in the second half that things take a turn. The next couple of stories become less macabre than simply odd, their weird fiction trappings conveyed more in atmosphere than plot. And then the last vestiges of the paranormal trappingsfall away, and we get stories that are mere slices of life in turn of the century Paris. “The Street of the First Shell” at least has some literary richness, focusing on the travails of the idealistic bohemian subculture in a besieged Paris during the Prussian War. At this point we've heard at least four stories about American painters in Paris—of which Robert Chambers was himself one—but each one has had something else to offer, some unique spin or take.

And then there's “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields.” I've never had a story in an otherwise solid collection squander so much of my good will. I just finished reading it and I couldn't tell you who the characters were or what happened, while I could chart out “The Repairer of Reputations” from memory almost line by line. Nothing whatsoever happens, and the trope of the American abroad, worn thin already, has absolutely nothing else to lean on, and so falls apart. The prose remains rich and eloquent, but good writing can only get you so far if the characters are bland and the story’s a dud, and I’m afriad both of these were the case here. The last story further tread this ground, though with a bit of intrigue to carry the reader along.

While uneven, the book still deserves its place in the proto-horror canon, if only for the first few stories, which are worth the price of admission.

The Great God Pan - Aurthur Machen

This is a strange one, the result of a Wikipedia trawl some time ago. Machen, though all but forgotten now, is in many ways the forefather of 20th century horror in the same way Horace Walpole was for the 19th, and The Great God Pan is his Castle of Otranto. It served as direct inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, and its preoccupation with strange gods, occult practices, and the corrosive effects of dark knowledge on the human psyche all presage HP Lovecraft.

The story opens with a man named Clarke, who witnesses an operation by Dr Raymknd on a young woman named Mary. The purpose of the procedure is to allow her a glimpse at another world populated by gods. The surgery is apparently successful, for the subject is promptly stru k by overwhelming terror and dissolves into idiocy. From there, the novel bounces between characters and locations, telling a fragmented story of another young woman named Helen, whose otherworldly beauty is ruinous to those around her, and speaks of dark forces.

The plot of the novel is a bit disjointed, and the multicameral nature of its telling makes it difficult to piece the different events together. But I can't deny its influence, and I can only imagine its novelty when it was published back in 1890. The prose is propulsive--slightly purple at times, but I have a weakness for that kind of writing, particularly in that genre and from that era. All in all a good find. I'll be sure to read more from him in the future.

Let the Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist

I’m hesitant about vampires.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m anti-vampire—an increasingly common stance in the post-Twilight world—but I do approach books about them with some degree of skepticism. They are, as a trope, a bit shopworn, and the sheer volume of stories about them have worn several crisscrossing ruts in the narrative earth. A careless write can all-too-easily slip into one, and find themselves unable to extract their story from its cliched depths.

As such, I read the first pages of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s book uncertain as to whether I’d bother finishing it. Part of this reluctance came from the fact that I couldn’t quite remember why it was I’d requested it in the first place—due to a processing error at my local library, I received my copy about 18 months after I’d put a hold on it. What passing whimsy first sparked my interest I’ve no idea.

In any case, I read the first chapter reluctantly, but after fifty pages or so my reluctance vanished. While it opens with a fairly common scene (shy protagonist, unpopular, beset by bullies), the story grows by maintaining the courage of its convictions. It treats vampirism not as an adolescent power fantasy, but as a terrible disease, which is how some of the earliest writers in the genre envisioned it.

Another strength is that it delves into the psychology of one of the more peculiar roles in the vampire mythos: the familiar. For those less familiar (no pun intended; seriously, I only noticed this while proofreading) with vampire fiction, a familiar is a vampire’s human servant and protector, performing the tasks that the vampire, exiled from daylight, cannot. Usually, the familiar serves the vampire with the hopes of one day joining his ranks. In Let the Right One In, his motives are different. The familiar, a middle-aged man named Håkan, has no interest in becoming a vampire himself. Instead, he goes about his grisly duties in order to feed his own particular hunger, one that is, in its way, just as sinister as the vampire’s.

I hesitate to comment on the prose, as the book is in translation from the Swedish, but he version I read was well-written, lyrical without being too flowery, though the occasional over-reliance on sentence fragments stuck out.

All in all, I’d recommend Let the Right One In for readers seeking a thoughtful, modern take on a classic trope, and those who can handle taboo subjects and a bit of gore.