Two to Begin

Here we are, at the start of another new year. How will it compare – better, worse, happier, heavier, brighter, darker – to last year? Whichever way the road turns, books make good travel companions.j

A visit to the bookstore is always a good way to start the new year. A jaunt to Kinokuniya – on a somewhat vague mission to add some quirkiness to the bookshelf – yielded two titles by as yet unread (by me) authors: Swede John Ajvide Lindqvist and Karen Joy Fowler.

I’s heard of Let The Right One In, but never got around to reading it. This one that I did get, Handling the Undead, has a dark-humoured though not very original premise: the dead coming back to life. What do you do when the loved one you lost and mourned for, return?

I am on page 100. John’s writing is neat, spare, but incisive. 100 pages in, and he has managed to balance the comic absurdity of corpses jerking back to life with the horror of the living at the encounter. Grief, loss, and pain permeate the narrative, though there are scenes of almost-hilarity (imagine a morgue with hundreds of new dead awakening).

I don’t know yet where John will steer the story, though I sincerely hope it doesn’t end up as a zombie gore fest.

Stephen King dealt with this subject matter in some depth in Pet Sematary, and simlar to King’s shambling corpses, John’s are also clearly bare of the human soul. King’s walking dead were very quickly and clearly monsters, though the reader can argue that the more monstrous were the relatives who brought them back to life in the first place. Both, I believe, deal with the pain that the loss of a loved one causes, dealing with death, and the question: what happens after we die?

I have more than two hundred pages more to go in this rather grim tale of the undead in Stockholm.

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