About this title: "Let the Right One In" Takes Top Honors at Tribeca Film Festival! It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780312355296ISBN:0312355297
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 472 p. Audience: General/trade. Read once and put on a shelf. Like new. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Griffin
Date Published: 2008-10-09
ISBN-13:9780312355296ISBN:0312355297
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780312355296. read more
"Massive and scattered, so my thoughts are all scattered too. It doesn't make for happy review writing.
Um. I liked the vampire. I wouldn't mind spending more time with her/him. And I liked Lindqvist's vampire technicalities: the cluster of cells in the chest, the 5 BPM heart rate, mentally growing and losing the fangs when it's time to hunt.
The drunks were sympathetic characters. I liked them, too.
OK, complaints.
1.) Is it hypocritical for me, as a fan of exploitation and horror films, to hate on this book for its graphic pedophilia? Probably. And I even feel like the graphic descriptions were justified, although I didn't understand why undead Håkan suddenly lost control of the rationality that stopped him from trying to molest Eli as a human. (Clearly the undead/vampires are capable of being rational. Eli could restrain herself from killing every human she came in contact with, no?) I truly hope the logic behind it was not that Håkan-vampire's erection was "unfinished business" that he was just trying to relieve. Because really. REALLY.
2.) Oskar as a character was unpleasant and flat. I only cared about him in relation to Eli, so I definitely did not care about his backstory or the backstory of any of the boys he knew -- the latter of which was a big part of the book, for no apparent reason. I skimmed a lot of that and thought that in a nearly 500 page book, it could easily have been edited out and the book would not have suffered.
I mean, I guess it's all there for us to understand the desolation of this Swedish neighborhood and the lives of the people in it. But I already got that from Oskar's bullying and the drunks and the snow and the fact that there's a PEDOPHILE ROAMING THE STREETS TRYING TO SEX CHILDREN AND ALSO, KILLING THEM AND DRAINING THEIR BLOOD.
3.) The change in tense in the Virginia scene was pretty messy. Don't know whether that's the fault of the writer, the translator, or the editor.
Overall, I didn't hate this book. I just didn't love it. There are definitely compelling moments, but 90% of them involve Eli, Lacke, and Virginia. And there's a whole lot of this book that isn't about those three."
"Let me preface my 3-star rating by saying that if this were the type of book I generally read, this would no doubt be 5 stars. As it is not, consider my 3-stars as the highest rating I can give this novel. By any account, this is a masterpiece of it's genre.
Let the Right One In is not for the squeamish. Not for the easily despressed. Definitely not for the teen looking for the next "Twilight". This is not your mother's "Dracula".
This novel is relentlessly dark. Its characters are broken and wasted in ways that can't be fixed. Although Eli is the "official" vampire, I'd really say that in some form or another, all the characters are vampiric. They exist in perpetual dispair and hopelessness and feed off of whatever addiction gets them through: booze, sex, theft, drugs, religion, bullying...you get the idea.
When I read a book by someone like Lidqvist, or Stephen King, or Edgar Allen Poe, I often wonder what drives them to write of the unrelenting darkness in the human heart. And then, I often find messages within the pages that resonate within myself, and then I undertand, if only for a while.
If you're a fan of the horror/vampire genre, this book will satisfy. And if you're a reader, like myself, who wants a book to take them out of their literary comfort zone, look no further then Let the Right One In."
"You know that bit at the beginning of Amadeus, where Salieri has composed this very uninspired little march, which he and the Emperor play for Mozart? Then Mozart sits down at the keyboard and says, hm, that's not quite right, is it? And he messes around with it for a couple of minutes, until he's suddenly transformed it into "Here's farewell to the games with the girls" from The Marriage of Figaro.
Well, it's like that Låt den rätte komma in and Twilight. John Ajvide Lindqvist has looked at Stephenie Meyer's book and said hm, that's not quite right, is it? And he's somehow rearranged its elements into a bloody masterpiece. I wouldn't have thought it could be done.
I can hear Mozart's irritating high-pitched giggle. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
"This book was so frickin' good! I read this book because I had been hearing great reviews of the Swedish film based on this book that is in theaters now. I wanted to see the movie, but of course was curious to read the book first. Amazing! A really effective and creepy re-invention of a vampire novel. Like a truly literate and very adult version of the Twilight novels, this book is about a "12-year-old" female vampire (actually hundreds of years old, of course, in the body of a little girl) who moves into a small community in Sweden, and falls in love with her deeply troubled and angst-filled 12-year-old neighbor. Rife with serial killers, pedophilia, school yard bullys, vampires, and unrequited love, this book is a must for anyone who likes their novels dark and twisted."
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