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Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Outside of Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples", this is probably the best vampire story that I've ever read. It's genuinely creepy, and while the plot is well done and the story is well-written in a stark style that reminds me of GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, one of the things that stood out is how well the author set up the atmosphere of each scene. There was a fairly large cast of characters and, about half way through the book, all their lives suddenly click together, onto a collision-course track, things speed up, and the book becomes horrifying riveting. By which I mean that this story is much more gory than things I typically read (though less gory than some of the SANDMAN stuff or my brief encounter with Stephen King's tales) but I was so invested that I couldn't stop. That being said, this is as much as psychological horror story as macabre horror, if not more so, and the other thing that was REALLY WELL DONE was how REAL and 3-D each of the characters are, to the point that, near the last quarter of the book, the story had moved on from scary to wrenching. Not sure if this should be an addition to my bookshelves, but it's definitely one of those books that is worth reading from cover to cover at least once.

So okay, that was a relatively concise review. It does not, however, leave enough room for my various feelings and general fannishness.

First of all: the gore. Oh the gore. It's really gross. I mean that it's pretty bad overall but in the last bit of the story it even got worse. Somehow. Erk. Then then there's the part where like the end of a firework show, where things just kept on happening. If this were a show it'd be a show I watch either by peeking from between my fingers or pausing so I can go take a break from all the stuff. Since I helpfully got it on my Kindle, to read in between my day, the pausing is less of an issue (though occasionally annoying because I'd have to stop right before where I know something really horrible was going to happen within the next three pages).

I have mentioned how real the characters are, and I think it took enormous amount of talent to make every character, from alcoholic to bully to murderer to a 13 year old boy, sympathetic. No, "sympathetic" is perhaps too strong a word. To make us capable of emphasizing, maybe. Or, perhaps, make them understandable, in the sense that we can relate to those types of people and acknowledge that they are the sort we see every day, that those people exist.

That's something important, right there. The alcoholics and bullies and murderers and teens are also lovers and sons and fathers and teachers, they have friends and lives and have their own stories to tell, and the author somehow took those stories and wove them together in this work of horror, so that we are invested in their individual stories as much as the overall story. We don't have to like them. We are invested in them, in their fears and dreams and tears.

That's what kept me reading, despite of the slight lag in the very start and the frankly incredible amount of bodily fluid being slung everywhere.

Good stories are the stories that stay with you and prompts stories of your own. This is the other part of the story that stayed and will stay with me: the very realistic depiction of bullying. Not necessarily the details -- the how and when and with what-- but the emotions and atmosphere behind it.

Over two decades in and I'm just reaching the point where I can finally talk about my own experience in it (I'm thinking with all the anti-bullying campaigning going on that I might blog about it soon and throw in my own two cents), and though the types of bullying are many, even within the same culture, some things are universal:  the resignation from the victim and, before a person could ever learn to fight or even think of fighting,  the first time something changed and that person thought "No."

This book's got that moment penned down, accurate enough for me to feel the ghost burn of adrenaline.

For that, I applaud the book. 

In case anyone's wondering: 4 out of 5 because this isn't really the sort of story that I like to read, not the premise, not the style, and while I can emphasize with the characters I don't really particularly like any one of them. But it gets 4 out of 5 anyway because it's that good.