Let the Right One In

One of the best horror books I've read in awhile. The real-life fears of bullying, alcoholism, pedophilia, loneliness, and poverty juxtaposed with the supernatural terror of vampirism.

It is genuinely chilling and emotionally moving.

I was invested in all of the characters, including feeling empathy for the “villains.”

The ending was amazing, a little bit open-ended but also satisfying.

Gave up halfway through.

I got just over 25% of the way through, but I wasn't feeling the main POV/narrator. I'll definitely revisit this, but not anytime soon.

Friendship?

Well, this is not your typical coming of age story. Not your typical best friend got me out of my shell story. Not your typical something strange is affecting the town. It's mostly all of these things. It's not easy to root for any of these characters really.
We have or MC, we don't know too much about him, just that he's quiet and bullied.

In comes Eli. We find out quickly what he is and how he survives, thanks to the introduction of our other sort of main character/tragic villain/monster of sorts. As to how he became that, we find out in a crazy disturbing fever dream. (check out TW). He is selfish, and survivalist, but affects profoundly our MC and is probably his first friend, same for him i guess.

We have other side characters in the townspeople and they ground the story away from the coming of age friendship/love story, showing the reality of what it takes to live in Eli's world.

Overall way better than the movies, certainly better than the latest one, that really changes Eli's background. The pacing is what you'd expect of this author: slow, episodic and fever dreams inserted here and there.

3.75 rounded to 4 stars

I enjoyed the way the author would jump between different story lines and characters in order to tell a larger narrative. There were multiple creepy moments that kept me on my toes, while also including the humanity of the relationship between the Eli and Oscar.

9/10

I have no clue how this book won awards. Granted it hit the mark on creepy, disturbing and weird, but award winning? No. First off the vampire concept made no sense to me. Yes ok, the author tried an original take, but it just didn't add up for me. Now let's talk about the book as a whole. The beginning was promising. Internal conflicts, a disturbed child and a creepy murderer hovering in the background. This all built itself into a Stephen King like feel, but then the middle came. Where I have no idea what happened other than  being subject to disturbing dark sexual displays and internal monologs from characters I didn't care about. In fact I felt like the whole pack of drinkers were just extra. They didn't contribute to the story progression much. The only characters I even wanted to hear about were Oskar and Eli, but by the end of the book I was struggling to even care about them as well. The ending was predictable and left me unsatisfied. There was too little explained and a bunch of questions left hovering about. Not an author I will continue to read.

Un très beau roman, passionnant. Derrière une histoire fantastique de vampire se cache une description de la fin de l'enfance, de la solitude des banlieues occidentales, de la misère sociale. Une grande claque qui a été adapté dans le très bon film “Morse”.

Very different from the movie. In the movie, the focus is much more on bullying and how the Oskar-Eli relationship helps Oskar deal with his tormentors. The book extends the focus to include more complete views of peripheral characters. The bullying storyline, while still present, is not as prominent as in the movie and there is a lot more pedophilia, genital mutilation, gender confusion, sections narrated by a frightened squirrel, and even a masturbating zombie. Swedish literature, or at least the half-dozen books I've read, is odd.