Let The Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It’s been a long while since I’ve read anything this wonderful, engrossing, or disturbing.  It’s been years since I’ve read anything this good.

Let The Right One In is everything that you think it is, and nothing that you think it is.  Vampires, you think.  Well, you’re right.  Sort of.

If you’re coming across this title completely unawares: Let The Right One In is, more or less, the story of friendship between an ostracized almost teenager and a young-seeming (but very old) vampire.  What stands out, aside from the quality of the writing and the fantastical element of vampires (which is actually not heavy-handed for 95% of the book) is the believability of the story.  People act like you’d expect them to act, and are, if not fully realized, at least compelling characterizations.

It’s a story of friendship and loneliness, and of suffering and depravity (and of identity and anonymity) — but in all the wrong places.  Not wrong, necessarily, but unexpected.  Which is to say the story takes your expectations and muddles with your brain.  Makes you wonder.  Surprises you with what you already know.  There’s much in the story to find disturbing, but it doesn’t always come from the places you want it to come from, if you can want it to come from anywhere.  “Expect” is a better word, but not the right one.  The story doesn’t always lead where you’d hope. When it does, maybe you wish that’s not what you had hoped.

Let The Right One In makes you wonder about people, like you always do.  Makes you think.  Believe.  Wonder.

There’s not much that can be said without giving away the progression — the learning — of reading through the book, or watching the movie.  Lindqvist adds some interesting details to the science of vampires: curious asides that, for all their apparent insignificance, only work to strengthen the narrative as a whole.

Having come to the book by way of the movie, I feel like this is one of the few instances where neither the book nor the movie let the other down.  Both perform exceptionally; having seen the movie, the book still surprised me.  Changed my impressions, but without diluting the impact of the movie.  The book and movie are different in many ways, but they complement each other extraordinarily well.  They’ll bear re-reading & re-watching.

I loved this book.  I expect a long drought before I find something as interesting, challenging, and satisfying.

This is the last, best novel you will ever read. The last you will ever need to read; you could just read it over and over again, filled with the crushing immensity of its hope, despair, and comedy.

You will read other fiction, eventually. And then you will feel guilty.

“Life is sad. Here is someone.”

Anagrams shows futility better than anything else I have ever read, and it shows why that futility is irrelevant. Or might be.  I loved this book, maybe not from the first page, but definitely from the second.

If you read the first page, you must read through to the last page, or you will be totally and completely crushed.  You’re likely to be crushed anyway, but it’s a good feeling, when you finish: warm, and awkward, and embracing.

Read this now.

Chuck Palahniuk ends up telling the same story over and over again in his books. What’s astonishing is how fresh and gut-wrenchingly surprising (sorry) his approaches are. Even in his most tired formulations (sorry, Haunt), it’s still worth reading till the end. It doesn’t hurt that the basic “story” Palahniuk tells over and over again is among the strangest, yet most basically fundamental, things scratched on dead tree.

Rant rates as some of his best work.

It’s not that his writing shines, because it doesn’t. It’s not that the book starts off auspiciously, because it doesn’t, particularly. Or: it does, but of course you’re too wrapped up in preconceived notions to understand how much it’s going to blow you out of the water, by the end. And it’s unfair to say that the writing doesn’t shine, because–preconceived notions.

It’s difficult to say more, or anything.

The basic structure of Rant is that of an oral history, the sub-title tells you. Though you could probably figure it out pretty quickly based on the string of names that pop up, the bold-faced names by occupations and descriptors. Also because Palahniuk spells it out for you on the second page. Just in case you aren’t good at figuring things out. (In which case, incidentally, this book’s probably not for you anyway.) Like any of Palahniuk’s writing, Rant is schizophrenic, with lots of things going on, rapid-fire details vying for your attention, trying to disgust, compel, impress. But Rant is schizophrenic in different sorts of ways than, say, Survivor, or Fight Club. There are the usual things put there to snag your attention, the things that make good soundbites for reviews, jacket copy, blah blah blah. Party crashing, rabies, spider bites, and so on.

Yes, but. These are distractions, mostly. Mind you, the distractions are their own commentary, but they’re not the main show. Figuring out where distraction ends and something else starts is the whole point, or at least part of it. You want the story? Read the book. Just don’t expect applause.

Who says you can’t craft a totally compelling story around a horned dog named after an imaginary card game?

Walter Moers’ 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was most excellent, and this book surpasses even that. It’s cartwheeling, free-associating, spectacle-topping, coincidence-breaking fun, pure and simple. Though of course it isn’t simple. Nothing in Zamonia is, really.

The story begins with a tiny horned puppy, raised by dwarves (a kind of dwarf called a Hackonian, in case you were interested). But of course it can’t always be crumpets and daisies; sooner or later, everyone’s carted off to a free-roaming island by one-eyed giants that like to eat their prey live (the livelier, the better). And it’s from there that the story gets its wings and flies well beyond the stratosphere of creativity.

The titular Rumo is, as we find out, a Wolperting–a horned, superquick, civilized warrior dog. Held captive by the one-eyed beasts on Roaming Rock, he’s given the name ‘Rumo’ by a giant, eight-armed semi-aquatic and bulbous Shark Grub called Smyke.

But let’s not give away too much. Curious, astounding things happen, fate is defied, and we learn a little more about Zamonia and all its bizarre inhabitants in the process. Rumo’s a born hero–that much you should know: if you were hoping for a book centered around a vain, evil, megalomaniac badger-creature with wings, this isn’t the book for you.

Rumo is an epic like not much else. A different kind of epic. There’s alchemy, fortune-telling, sentient weapons, talking trees, living fog. Journeys beyond death.  Rumo falls in love, learns cabinetry, and journeys into lands typically braved only by the criminally deranged and the dangerously brutish.

More than that, the story is wickedly, brilliantly paced.  It’s filled with comical (and occasionally frightening) illustrations by the author, who also happens to be a cartoonist.  You follow Rumo along through danger and excitement with an unshakable curiosity and sense of awe, and before you know it, you’re at the end of the book, wishing you were only getting started.

Maybe you can go back and re-read The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear.

Saw and read lots of things. Same old story. Here, let’s think. Watched Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I thoroughly enjoyed; was at times an uncomfortable enjoyment, but that’s I think what Cronenberg was going for, mood-wise. Excellent performances all around, with what you might call a tightly-crafted script. This is a movie that manages to navigate between heady theory and base physicality without ever letting you know quite where it is at any given moment; it’s a thoughtful movie that throws you around, basically.

Lots of quality but non-outstanding books on my recently-finished list as of late. The new Bret Easton Ellis novel, Lunar Park, was better and worse than some of his other writing. Better writing than the earliest stuff, but not superior to Glamorama or American Psycho. Lunar Park was extremely promising at times—mostly when bizarrely surreal elements began creeping in—but in the end the whole thing was basically self-deflating. Pffft. If you haven’t already read an Ellis novel, I don’t know that you’d want to start with this one.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, fairly excellent. It’s an ‘unauthorized autobiography,’ which should give you some idea of the tone. Yes, the movie of the same name is based on it. Good, crazy fun. The book, for those not in the know, is Chuck Barris attempting to recount his frenzied dual rise to prominence as a game show producer and CIA assassin. It’s generally a quick read, as long as you don’t get bogged down by the whole question of what’s real and so forth.

I picked up Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Repetition partly on the merits of its cover, and wasn’t disappointed. Though confused. There’s some weird stuff that goes on with the tenses and what-have-you—this is ascribed to Robbe-Grillet’s unique literary theories by someone inside the front cover—but none of it is in any way unreadably strange. Brain calisthenics, is all. The story, if you’re interested in knowing, is a sort of noir spy thriller sort of thing, but without much clarity as far as any of the spy details are concerned.

Alongside Repetition, I read another slightly off-kilter spy novel: Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess. Which certainly didn’t help with the whole confusion thing—I wasn’t actively trying to seek out spy novels—but did perhaps help to set the mood of the reading. Tremor of Intent is simultaneously serious and goofy, satiric and honorable, and/or highly detailed and generic. All these things are at least partly true. Generally speaking, if the vague mention of “theory” and “weird stuff” of Repetition sound like something you might not go for, you might still be able to enjoy Tremor of Intent. Imagine an older, vastly more cynical, slightly more cunning James Bond and place him on a wild last retirement mission, and you have a vague idea of this book (though you’ll probably have more misconceptions than you will correct assumptions… but oh well.).

All in all, a pretty good collection of entertainment media.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet, ends up being a disappointment, but only because the last few hundred pages pale in comparison to the incomprehensible brilliance of the first 250. Honestly, the beginning is outstanding, so it’s not really Millet’s fault that the rest can’t compare. Once you bring the three forefathers of the atomic bomb back from the dead, it’s a difficult proposition to know what to do with them, exactly. It’s one of those mediocre-by-comparison ordeals; if the start of the book were less spectacular, would the entire book perhaps seem more genius? Despite these misgivings, I’d tend to recommend this book, and heartily, at that. Lydia Millet manages to combine humor, drama, and social criticism in ways you wouldn’t think were possible. More impressively, she gives credible voices to the dead physicists, making Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer, and Enrico Fermi powerful characters in her work.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

In all likelihood you do not need me to tell you that this is a fascinating and well-written book, so I won’t dwell on the obvious. It’s a book I’ve been encouraged to read on numerous occasions and, having read it, I’m not disappointed. One thing I found refreshing was how on-target Diamond remained throughout the entire book; often, in anthropology/sociology/(etc.-ology) books that veer into or are targeted at pop culture, the author makes numerous departures from the main idea to relate entertaining or otherwise informative anecdotes that do not correspond directly to the thrust of the work. This makes the books fun to read (and imparts fun facts on the reader) but has the unfortunate side-effect of diminishing the strength of the author’s thesis. Diamond rarely veers, and somehow makes sure that all his anecdotes are highly germane to the GGS canon. For this reason, despite its length, Guns, Germs, and Steel is actually fairly straightforward and simple to understand.

Girl in the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender

This is as entertaining a collection of stories as any, and one of them is enough to get you hooked (or ought to be, anyway). The title is catchy—it’s what caught my attention—but is also interesting for the fact that the eponymous story is possibly the weakest in the collection. Which is to say that it’s quite good, but not brilliant. Good stuff. What’s to say? A fun, quirky mix of realism and fantasy, elements of the absurd and the totally expected mixed together expertly.