Book Review: Let the Right One In

I've always aligned my vision of a vampire with those that appear in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, and Robert McCammon's They Thirst: a terrifying creature, with sharpened fangs ready to wreak havoc and draw a little blood in the process. Those scary tales always managed to get my adrenaline pumping and sometimes spook myself into thinking a vampire was waiting for me just around the next dark corner. But something changed, turned them from the stuff of nightmares into objects of romantic flights of fancy, and my interested ebbed.

Perhaps I'm biased. I like my monsters dark and scary.

Luckily, I've found my way back to the vampire tales, thanks in great part to John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In. Okay, the movie version actually piqued my interest first when we saw it in late December last year, but I was piqued enough to find a copy of the novel.

The story centers around Oskar, a young boy with an interest in the macabre who is constantly picked on by three bullies at school. It's only away from school, when he's either back at the apartment complex re-reading his scrapbook of police news clippings or eating the candy he's stolen from a shop, that he feels the safest. He sometimes acts out how he's going to fight back against the bullies, and it's on just such a night while practice jabbing a small knife at a tree that he runs into Eli, the new girl in his apartment complex. She doesn't talk much, simply staring at him from atop the jungle gym, but when she finally does, it's only to say that they can't be friends before heading back into the complex.

Seemingly innocuous, but as the story progresses, Lindqvist slowly builds the horror by allowing the reader in on the secret, what Oskar doesn't realize: that Eli's a vampire. And one thing this novel does well is to stick to the vampire mythos such as not being able to stand the sunlight (especially during a very vivid scene with one of Eli's victims in a hospital room), the intense dislike of cats (and violent reaction from them), extraordinary strength, and not being allowed to enter a room or house without being invited. (One of the best scenes in the book -- and the movie -- occurs when Oskar decides to test Eli's ability to enter a room without an invitation.)

This is a fantastic novel that does much more than tell a simple, terror-filled vampire tale. The novel creates an interesting relationship between the two main characters, which begins with the reader trying to decide when Eli will attack Oskar and morphs into a strange friendship. The trust between the two becomes so great that Eli decides to reveal her history to Oskar, touching on some very sensitive events. Which leads me to a question I considered when writing my quickie review of the movie. Could the title Let the Right One In have more than one meaning? Does it refer to a vampire's need to be invited into a room, and Oskar's testing of that? Or does it refer to Eli's dropping her wall to tell Oskar her history?

Even if you don't enjoy horror stories, this is one that is definitely worth reading.

Image from Bookhills.