InsaneJournal

and then there were three
There's currently three vampire/werewhatever authors I can stand.

Charlaine Harris, since she doesn't tend to take herself seriously (despite style problems early on in the series and varying problems later on).

Kelley Armstrong, who writes messed up (if tending towards Sue-ish) characters and who's put some interesting work into her world-building.

And now John Lindqvist, whose book Let the Right One In took everything I hate about the standard human-meets-vampire novel and threw it out the window. There's no heavy-handed vampirey seduction here: the main characters are twelve and twelve-going-on-230. There's no epic "ZOMG I R MONSTER" angst. Hell, there's not really even gender. Eli, the vampire, goes about as a girl, then reveals s/he was once a boy who was genitally mutilated before being turned and goes about as a boy, then puts on a sundress and is a girl for a bit again.

And though the prose is a bit simplistic at times, and the ending doesn't exactly blindside you, the characters are all so staggering, show-stoppingly messed up that I wanted to huggle the book and carry it around with me. Oskar, the twelve year old main character, is bullied at school, accidentally wets himself on a regular basis, and wants to be a serial killer when he grows up. Eli, beyond gender, is also frequently beyond hygiene--but not beyond picking off the neighbors. Who, by the way, are all messed up. There's the young delinquents, the aging, dreaming alcoholics, the desperate divorcees and the edging-into-abusive cops they want to be with, and oh yeah the pedophile who lives with Eli, who kills people for blood so s/he can live, who steals the money from his victims' bodies, and who gives it to the kids he can't bring himself to molest because they're not Eli.

Strangely enough, even with the pedophile and Oskar's vague interest in porn and the eventual rapacious zombie with a permanent hardon, the underlying 'ship story, of a young boy and the genderless monster who really may or may not eat him one day, comes off as strangely pure. They play with Rubik's cubes, they tap secret messages to each other in Morse code, they snuggle, they wrestle, Oskar has to explain to Eli that when he says he wants them to "go out" that he doesn't mean they have to do anything besides what they're already doing . . .

But when Eli starts acting more like a little kid and less like an extremely old being in a little kid's body, and the pedophile starts to freak out because it's harder for him to justify lusting after an extremely old being that just happens to look like a child, and by the way the crazy cat man in the next building saw something that looked like a kid kill one of the local alcoholics . . .


. . . I think I have to buy this one now. :P