Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist

In a similar vein Linqvist focuses on the human response to a zombie outbreak. The cruelty and violence of Oskar’s schoolmates contrasts the violence of Eli’s lifestyle one is a necessity for survival while the other borders on the inhuman, I’ll let you guess which is which.

Oskar’s alienation and outsider status as a result of his bullying parallels Eli’s isolation due to her nature. Oskar and Eli’s relationship is predicated on a very human need to connect with another person. One of the most wonderful things about Let the Right One In (I’m talking about the film since I never did get around to reading the book) is the inversion of the human/monster binary. Handling the Undead is Lingvist’s second novel and takes the same subtle and human approach to vampirism he used in his debut and this time applies it to zombies. For those that don’t know John Adjvide Lingvist is the author who wrote the novel called Let the Right One In/ Let Me In which was then turned into a Swedish film and recently “localized” (almost shot-for-shot from what I’ve heard) in an American remake. The Great Email Hacking of 2010 has caused my interactions with internet over the last few weeks to be a bit tentative at best not to mention that The Terror by Dan Simmons isn’t the most fast paced novel and is about as slow moving as the arctic ice it’s set in, but more on that later. So my Halloween horror reading is going slowly. Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist