Let the Right One In Takes Top Honors at Tribeca Film Festival and is now an Award-winning movie in both the U.S. and Sweden! It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager 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 … long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.
But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . .Sweeping top honors at film festivals all over the globe, director Tomas Alfredsson’s film of Let the Right One In has received the same kind of spectacular raves that have been lavished on the book. American and Swedish readers of vampire fiction will be thrilled!
Following the success in Sweden, this movie was remade starring Kodi Smit Mcpheem, Chloe Grace Moretz and Richard Jenkins under the new title Let Me In. The story has continued to reach new viewers in a London Musical and the book remains a vampire favorite among its readers.
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Poignant and creepy
If your thing is vampires, then this is a must for your collection. It took me far too long to get to it, but I’m glad I finally did. The vampires are classic in nature–no team Edward here, and whether intentional or not, there’s an underlying commentary on gender identity that makes this more than another vampire novel.
Like wrapping a blood-drenched knife in cotton wool, this is a five star novella wrapped in a 2 star novel. There’s just way too much unnecessary fluff.
On re-read with the fine folk over at Horror Aficionados it has become clear to me that this is an extremely flawed book.
The core of the story is the relationship between Oskar and Eli, everything else is secondary to that. Unfortunately, subplots relating to Tommy, Lacke, Virginia, Jocke, and especially Hakan litter the pages with distracting stuff that is largely irrelevant to the main narrative.
Half of the book could have been cut to produce a tightly written, pacey novella that carried all the scare, chills and horror implicit in the story.
But, instead we got a bloated novel that spends pages and pages on irrelevant relationships and the mental drivel of a guilt-ridden child rapist and serial killer who doesn’t have the courage to end his problem once and for all.
As for the core narrative, 5 stars for creating a character in Eli that transgresses so many boundaries at once as to be quite unforgettable, as for Oskar – he’s mostly a prat.
As for the narrative as a whole, this is a dark, and chilling book, and I’m left with the sneaking suspicion that Eli is simply replacing Hakan with Oskar, who will be the latest in a two-hundred year long line of stooges that he has bent to his will.
Oskar, being who he is, will welcome the iron servitude to a dark master wrapped in the velvet glove of acceptance and friendship.
This was different from every other vampire story I have read. Most of us have read the ones that glamorize these creatures. Well, the author of this one has a different version and I, for one, really enjoyed it.
Throughout this story the author has created moments of intense, psychological horror. There are two moments that would have driven me absolutely insane if I were put into the same situations! What I took away from this was the friendship that develops between the two main characters that literally saves them both! You need to pick this one up!!
Unfortunately I did not finish reading this book and stopped at 41%.
I’ve loved vampires ever since reading Anne Rice back in high school. So it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to give this one a go. Sadly, I couldn’t continue on any further than where I got for several reasons, though I will say there were some positives to take away from my experience.
First and foremost, I did like Oskar and Eli as characters. I think that their interactions were strange and interesting, and that largely kept me going. Oskar is a victim of the bullies at school, and doesn’t really know what else to do until his life is changed by meeting Eli. Eli has plenty of mystery built around them, and I enjoyed that element.
That being said, there are a lot more POV’s than just Oskar and Eli, and I think overall these additional characters really slowed down the pace of the book to the point where I just wanted things to move forward. I do understand that they are a part of the story, but there’s just too much back and forth and it took me away from what made the book most interesting.
The plot was intriguing and I was already familiar given that I had watched the movie years ago, but I felt that it was extremely similar to the film, so much that I often wandered why I didn’t just watch the movie and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong, there are interesting developments and not everything is exactly the same, but reading it is just a different experience, one that I didn’t enjoy as much.
A central theme of this book besides bullying is pedophilia, and that also impacted my experience negatively. This theme was explored to an extent that made me uncomfortable, and I just don’t think a lot of people will appreciate that.
Overall, this book was interesting, but due to an abundance of characters, a slow-moving plot, and the unnerving theme of pedophilia I cannot recommend this book.
An abused boy becomes best friends with another boy, a 600 year old vampire.
I’m hesitant about vampires.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m anti-vampire—an increasingly common stance in the post-Twilight world—but I do approach books about them with some degree of skepticism. They are, as a trope, a bit shopworn, and the sheer volume of stories about them have worn several crisscrossing ruts in the narrative earth. A careless write can all-too-easily slip into one, and find themselves unable to extract their story from its cliched depths.
As such, I read the first pages of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s book uncertain as to whether I’d bother finishing it. Part of this reluctance came from the fact that I couldn’t quite remember why it was I’d requested it in the first place—due to a processing error at my local library, I received my copy about 18 months after I’d put a hold on it. What passing whimsy first sparked my interest I’ve no idea.
In any case, I read the first chapter reluctantly, but after fifty pages or so my reluctance vanished. While it opens with a fairly common scene (shy protagonist, unpopular, beset by bullies), the story grows by maintaining the courage of its convictions. It treats vampirism not as an adolescent power fantasy, but as a terrible disease, which is how some of the earliest writers in the genre envisioned it.
Another strength is that it delves into the psychology of one of the more peculiar roles in the vampire mythos: the familiar. For those less familiar (no pun intended; seriously, I only noticed this while proofreading) with vampire fiction, a familiar is a vampire’s human servant and protector, performing the tasks that the vampire, exiled from daylight, cannot. Usually, the familiar serves the vampire with the hopes of one day joining his ranks. In Let the Right One In, his motives are different. The familiar, a middle-aged man named Håkan, has no interest in becoming a vampire himself. Instead, he goes about his grisly duties in order to feed his own particular hunger, one that is, in its way, just as sinister as the vampire’s.
I hesitate to comment on the prose, as the book is in translation from the Swedish, but he version I read was well-written, lyrical without being too flowery, though the occasional over-reliance on sentence fragments stuck out.
All in all, I’d recommend Let the Right One In for readers seeking a thoughtful, modern take on a classic trope, and those who can handle taboo subjects and a bit of gore.
This was a great book! One that I will remember for a long while . I recommend it for anyone who wants to be kept up at night because you can’t put it down.
Enjoy this book a lot. Introduced me to Swedish Thrillers, along with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Great characters and straight forward story telling. Looking forward to rereading it later this year
Best Vampire Story since Salems Lot
It was a new twist on an old topic. It was unexpected and frightening in a very different way from other vampire novels I’ve read.
It also combines the way a bullied child finds comfort in an unconventional relationship with a unique vampire character.
Soulful, gorgeous writing.
Even though this book is slightly older and had been converted into both a Swedish and a U.S. film, I was able to approach it with a blank slate. I hadn’t seen either movie and knew only the basics about it being a vampire book. Oh, and that it was a good story. I was very pleased and entertained.
The story focuses on Oskar, a 12-year-old boy and target of the local bullies. One evening Oskar makes friends with Eli, the girl next door who just recently moved in. Oskar finds her strange but also nice and the two become friends. Meanwhile their town of Blackeberg starts to play a bigger part as people start dying and the connection to Eli becomes apparent.
LET ME IN pleasantly surprised me in several spots. One element was that there was a pretty large cast of characters; this worked out nicely because it meant that when someone was killed, it could be a “real character” and not just someone that was going to die from the start. Plus, it meant that I could see the effects of the death on other people. Also, the story went for longer than I thought before the word vampire was even brought up. And then it seemed like shortly after that point when Oskar realized what the rest of us already knew. Once that happened, I had to shift my mind away from all the predictions I had built because the story was going somewhere that I hadn’t planned. Then right around the time that Oskar goes to visit his dad, I realized that the story was about growing up, about changing and maturing. It was about finding and holding on to what made you happy in life. Oskar learned to stand up for himself, that his own life was worth fighting for. Eli learned to enjoy life rather than existing through the moments. The idea is even mirrored in the relationship between Virginia and Lacke, especially once Virginia gets sick. All of that became clear to me when Oskar thought “Which monster do you choose?” That became a watershed moment for me. So, was there any negative to the book? Not really. At the time I was going through it, the first quarter of the book seemed slow but then I realized it was providing a true depth to the characters and events that were occurring. Now I need to get Lindqvist’s short story collection LET THE OLD DREAMS DIE in which the title story continues the story of Oskar and Eli.