Let The Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Låt den rätte komma in (2004)
Translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg
Text Publishing (2007)
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Reviewed by Angela Slatter, May 2007
“Oskar lives with his mum in a Stockholm highrise. He likes eating sweets, and collecting stories of violent murder from the newspaper, and he has a slight incontinence problem. The kids at school call him Piggy and beat him up.
Luckily, the new girl next door shows promise. Eli smells a bit and never seems to feel the cold and sometimes her hair has a lot of grey in it. So there’s a good chance she’s an even bigger misfit than Oskar.
But her ‘father’ is another matter. There’s a whiff of something very bad hanging around him.
Right after their arrival, a child’s body is found hanging from a tree, and amid the media frenzy other weird things start to happen. The police think it’s a serial killer. They’re so wrong.”
In my younger days, I used to read a lot of horror. I drifted away, however, when it all became one long trail of hack, slash, hockey masks and Freddy Kruger striped sweaters. I did, however, stick with vampire lit. I go back to Dracula once every couple of years, just because it retains the power to scare me, and whilst it is not perfect, it is brilliant. I still love Le Fanu’s Camilla, campy old thing that it is. When it’s good, vampire lit is wondrous to behold.
When it’s bad, vampire lit gets stuck in the train-track rhythm of Suck, kill, sleep. Suck, kill, sleep. It gets old very quickly (unless you have a particularly long attention span and tolerance for repetition – which I do not). Anne Rice, I’m sad to say, makes my head ache with her formula of self-obsessed, aristo-vamp flitting across the world, inserting self into historical events, and telling everyone how very, very naughty, subversive and attractive he/she is. I keep going back to vampire lit with a bloody-minded optimism because I like to think that someone, someday will do something different. As a result, there have been some wonderful moments of discovery when I happened upon works like Tanith Lee’s The Blood of Roses, Barbara Hambly’s Immortal Blood and Kim Newman’s Red Reign.
Imagine my joy to find Let The Right One In, a Swedish vampire love story, and the scariest thing I’ve read in a long time.
After the first couple of chapters, I had to make some rules for reading this book: don’t read it after dark; don’t read it when alone in the house; when you reach critical mass on being scared, put the book down; if you hear yourself making “squeeeeee” sounds, put the book down; and if possible, hold your hands over your eyes whilst reading, peering out between your fingers.
Things to note: most of the children in this book are not very nice. In fact most of the people in this book are not very nice – but you get used to them. You even get comfortable with them – which is uncomfortable in itself (like reading Tournier’s The Ogre and finding yourself almost convinced by the loony logic). You do start to care and you want to stay with them: the nasty children, the beautiful monster that is Eli, the morally-conflicted Hakan, and the apathetic group of drunks who learn the secret of what’s wreaking havoc in the suburb of Blackeberg.
The narrative is powerful, tightly controlled and a joy to read. The book is translated from Swedish and it’s a wonderful translation. Translations are tricky things – you hope to high heaven that the translator knows enough to translate the spirit of a text, not simply to correlate words – for example, in English you say “You’re pulling my leg”; to say something in the same spirit in Italian, you need to come out with “You’re pulling my nose” – not an exact translation of precise meaning, but a precise translation of sense. Let The Right One In is a great translation because it hasn’t lost its power to inspire dread. And no spelling mistakes 
The sense of place is very strong. You feel the oppression of a blighted suburb, of the painful burden of being here felt by its inhabitants: the aimless alcoholics, the fatherless children passing their hours in bullying one another, thieving or sniffing glue. The book really does create empathy in the reader and perhaps this is why you stick with what is otherwise quite a depressing story.
The reeling out of Eli’s history is tightly managed. There are a lot of threads and characters in this book, and Lindqvist has managed to keep them all in play, drawing them together flawlessly at the end. Not everything is tidily put away – the things left unresolved create some truly genuine creepiness – sometimes the monster doesn’t just go away or get vanquished; sometimes other monsters rise up in its place.
There’s no tell in this book, it’s all show. The action moves quickly, the characters are convincing, the scares nasty and awe-inspiring. Sonya Hartnett’s comment on the back cover reads “A smart, sprawling romp that’s all about love and courage and loyalty … the monsters are angelic, the streets are more shadowy than the forest, and the innocent little children are not to be trusted. I haven’t read such a bold, free-wheeling novel in years. I loved every word of it.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “horror” as “[noun & adjective]: a painful feeling of loathing or fear; (of literature, films, etc) designed to attract by arousing pleasurable feelings of horror” … this is what you get with passages like this:
“She walked out into the kitchen and got a sharp little fruit knife, went back out and sat down in the couch in the living room, rested the blade against the underside of her arm.
Only to get her through the night. Tomorrow she would seek help. It was self-evident she couldn’t keep going like this. Drink her own blood. Of course not. There would have to be a change. But for now …
The saliva rose in her mouth, wet anticipation. She cut into herself. Deeply …” (p.269).
Let The Right One In was first published in Sweden in 2004 and the English translation came out this year (and was awarded the prize of best translated novel in Norway – see, I told you it was a good translation, even if the award was for a Swedish to Norwegian translation). Lindqvist grew up in Blackeberg in Stockholm, and has been variously a stand-up comic, magician, playwright and TV scriptwriter. On the list of quirky things one can boast about: he came second in the Nordic card-trick championships. His other two books (untranslated as yet) are: Hanteringen av odöda (2005), which is a zombies-take-over-Stockholm novel, and Pappersväggar (2006), a collection of short horror stories. Let The Right One In is being made into a film by Tomas Alfredsson (Winner, Best Swedish Film Award).
Get it, read it, but follow the rules.
