Oskar hurriedly said: “Maybe you already have a guy at your school.”
“No, I don’t…but Oskar, I can’t. I’m not a girl.”
Oskar snorted. “What do you mean? You’re a guy?”
“No, no.”
“Then what are you?”
“Nothing.”
Oskar doesn’t have much going for him: lonely, unsure of himself, incontinent – especially when he’s under stress, which is all the time now that he’s in middle school and being bullied on a daily basis. He collects newspaper clippings about famous murders, fantasizes about killing his tormentors and being able to do something instead of giving up again and again. So he’s oddly pleased when a ritual murder happens in his small town of Blackeburg. A young boy is strung up and drained of blood, right around the time a beautiful girl his own age moves into the apartment next door. Eli, who’s never seen a Rubik’s cube but solves it after one day. Eli, who looks emaciated and grey-haired one day, healthy the next, who sits outside in the snow-covered playground with no coat and never feels cold. Eli, who only comes out after dark.
I’d seen the movie (the Swedish-language version) based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel years before I read the book. And while I enjoyed the movie very much, I was a little wary about how much the story might have been changed in the transition from book to movie. What I got was something rare: an excellent book, with an adaptation that stays true to the spirit of the original story (in some places the dialog is almost word-for-word), but at the same time there are enough changes to make reading the book and watching the movie two completely different experiences.
A word of warning: this book gets dark. I mean really dark. Eli’s servant/slave is a man named Hakan, and it’s explained from the very start that Hakan is a pedophile. Too frightened and ashamed to fully act on the urges that destroyed his life, he worships Eli for needing him (sort of), and for looking like a child while being too old and too strong to ever be his victim. He’s a truly pitiful creature, but his obsession with children is the central factor of his whole existence, something which ends up going much further later in the book.
Eli’s story is also overflowing with pain and violence. The reader gets to see Eli’s history in gory detail, via a kind of telepathic image shared with Oskar. The process for turning Eli was horrific, without a shred of the gothic romance or even lust that happens in other vampire books. Lindqvist has his own take on the concept of vampires, coming up with with details that are equal parts mutated biology and supernatural elements. (The book has what’s probably my favorite variation on the myth about vampires having to be invited inside. It’s a vivid image; probably why it worked so well in the movie.)
All of the quirky secondary characters from Blackeburg get their own stories as well: the ringleader of the group of bullies, the police officer dating the mother of one of Oskar’s classmates, the random assortment of drunks and shut-ins from the neighborhood. Even the worst of them has a moment to be, well, if not likable, then at least a little bit sympathetic. It makes what happens to each character hit that much harder, when they inevitably get caught up in the fallout of living near a monster that can make more monsters. A scene that takes place with one of the townspeople locked in a cellar felt like it went on for an eternity, and it made me want to shut my eyes and flip forward a few pages so I wouldn’t have to watch what happened.
“I herewith dub you, Jonny’s conqueror, knight of Blackeberg and all surrounding areas like Vallingby…um…”
“Racksta.”
“Maybe Angby?”
“Angby maybe.”
Eli tapped him lightly on the shoulder for each new area. Oskar took his knife out of the bag, held it out, and proclaimed that he was the Knight of Angby Maybe. Wanted Eli to be the Beautiful Maiden he would rescue from the Dragon.
What really caught my attention and made me love both the movie and the book was the fact that this was more than a horror story; it’s a fantasy. Just like Oskar pretending to be a vicious murderer who could take on the other children who hurt him, this story is a daydream about making the pain stop. It’s being lonely and then finding a friend who finds the same things interesting that you do, who gets into a helpless fit of giggles with you over nothing. It’s being the kind of person who’s strong enough to stay a friend with someone who horrifies everyone. Including you.
And best and most satisfying of all, it’s having someone who loves you come charging in at just the moment when you need them most, and doing truly awful things to the people who are hurting you. I can’t think of another horror story that made me smile this much.