MadgeWhitlin

Huh...

I've wanted to read this book for a few years until, finally, desperate for horror I own and haven't read yet, I remembered I had bought the Kindle edition of this about a year ago and forgotten about it. I'm glad I waited to read it, though, because I don't think I would have liked it as much if I hadn't been in just the right mood.

This kind of reminded me of the Vampire Chronicles books, just a little. Like, if Anne Rice and Stieg Larsson (no, not because he and Lindqvist are both Swedish, it's something about the tone or style, idk) had teamed up to write a vampire novel, with a little input from...someone else...Neil Gaiman, maybe...this is what the result would be. I'm impressed with the intricacies and spiderweb links between all the characters, and how developed they were, especially considering how many characters there were to keep track of.

I love the take on vampires for this book. I haven't encountered anything exactly like it before, and I like it. The shape changing, the teeth, the way the infection is spread, everything. It was very well done and managed to remind me of plenty of other vampire stories while remaining unique.

I really liked Eli and a few other characters, but I wasn't a big fan of Oskar's, to be honest. My heart broke for Eli, and Virginia, Lacke, and Gösta. Speaking of Gösta, if I'd known about the part with the cats, I might not have read this. Anything bad happening to an animal, even in a book or movie, really gets to me. I mean, I can handle a brief mention, like saying a pet has died, but any further details sometimes get to me so bad I have to put down the book (or stop the movie, etc.) because I can't deal with it. Probably others, but it's all kind of a blur right now. There were a lot of characters, which is something I'm normally not fond of, but I liked it in this case. Maybe because each character stood out so much. And, while I hated Håkan for what he was, I think I might have hated Jonny, Jimmy, and Staffan more. Staffan, for some reason, made me really uneasy and I hated him from the start. I got the feeling that it wouldn't take much for him to snap and turn abusive, and his over-inflated sense of power bothered me a lot. He really seemed to get off on it, and how he could use his police uniform to scare Tommy or something. Plus the just-below-the-surface threat of violence toward's Tommy's mother after he burned himself making tea. Ugh. I was honestly kind of hoping he would go downstairs and Håkan would rip him apart or something. But Jimmy and Jonny enraged me. I went to school with people like both of them. I've seen kids do shit like what Jonny and his gang did to Oskar and I was pleased with how things turned out for them.

I feel like the ending wasn't totally satisfying, but I like that for some reason. I like that it's kind of...open, or something. I kind of wish this was part of a duology.