Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist Search Amazon for other books by or about John Ajvide Lindqvist. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

Vampires, as should be well-known by now, cannot enter an unfamiliar room or house unless they are specifically invited. This is why, if there is a knock at the door but apparently no one there, it is generally speaking a bad idea to issue an invitation. This is, of course, a metaphor as well as an apparently literal fact. That is, people can be safe in their own homes unless they deliberately invite trouble in from outdoors. Folk tales from around the world focus on this or similar lessons. However, trouble must survive too and so evolves into more pleasant or attractive forms. If the devil could just walk in anywhere and do his dirty work, then he would have no need to wear a pleasant face. Vampires, similarly, are constrained to act in secret and to ensure that the rest of creation sees only those aspects of their lives that it is deemed safe to reveal--which leads to lesson number two, if you see a vampire feeding, get away very, very quickly. This is true whether or not the vampire is one of the old school Dracula-like blood-suckers or the new style angst-ridden and rather gorgeous alabaster youths with a good line in flirtation. Avoid, in short, any preternaturally strong alien creature intent on drinking your blood to save its life.

This would certainly be good advice for the characters in John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel, Let the Right One In, since it is in permitting the arrival of the alien that ruin is brought down upon so many of them. This is appropriate for a vampire-based novel and the author brings about a suitable number of scenes of horror and despair--the book is advertised as "now a major film" and it is evident that there are various scenes which would lend themselves to cinema, being very visual in nature--the translation of the book from the original Swedish is competent enough but drains the prose of any form of literary quality that it might once have possessed. What is more interesting, however, is the setting of the novel, which is a form of sink estate on the outskirts of Stockholm in 1981. The early 1980s are memorable (in Europe in any case) most for the deep misery inflicted upon society and the working classes by the onset of the Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl paradigm that has finally come unravelled now. The characters are not entirely sympathetic--in most cases, wholly unsympathetic. Young Oskar is bullied at school, while his mother is compassionate but rather feeble; his estranged father, meanwhile, lives in the middle of nowhere and drinks with a powerful thirst. Many of the other characters are alcoholics or at least drunks, drifters and thieves of one stripe or another--and that is without considering the villains. It is a somewhat Hogarthian view of society and some readers are likely to find it difficult to empathise with the characters who are threatened with vampire-based violence. Perhaps these rough edges will have been smoothed off in the film, which I have not seen, not being much of a cinema-going type (and I'm not sure whether it has made it to Bangkok yet anyway).

This is an entertaining read with moments of horror and some human interest, as well, albeit one which might have been a leaner and better read at eighty to one hundred pages shorter. The characters too often speak in the same way and lack intellectual hinterland or even thought patterns beyond the needs of the plot but, still, it is a vampire story and people who like them will probably like this.