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Let the Right One In: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Creator: Ebba Segerberg
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $10.85
You Save: $5.10 (32%)
New (19) Used (4) from $9.15
Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 1200
Media: Paperback
Edition: Mti
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312355297
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780312355296
ASIN: 0312355297
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
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Product Description
Let the Right One In Takes Top Honors at Tribeca Film Festival!
It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day. But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . . Sweeping top honors at film festivals all over the globe, director Tomas Alfredsson’s film of Let the Right One In has received the same kind of spectacular raves that have been lavished on the book. American readers of vampire fiction will be thrilled!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Victims and Victimizers March 4, 2008
Dr. W. L. Lyon (Canterbury, Kent UK)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindovist. has one fantastic element: vampires. It's set in a suburb of Stockholm, on a social housing development that has become a sink estate. It's a sad place, full of aimless people. The people with responsibility - teachers, policemen, parents, are, for the most part, trying to do the right thing. They've got good intentions.
The book has a huge cast of characters with the major division between adults and children, each subdivided into the successful, more or less, and the failures, with a further division into victims and victimizers. The book opens with a bullied child, Oskar, who fantasizes about becoming a mass murderer. He meets Elli, a child vampire. The predictable does not happen.
Many of the adults on the estate are as powerless as the children - lonely, middle aged and elderly alcoholics, unemployed or working at minimum wage jobs. They are presented with a moral choice similar to that of the children: even if a victim, one can refuse to victimize others. (And that is the major freedom the characters in the book have.)
An earlier reviewer said he/she wasn't sure if this was belonged in horror... it's horror in the same way that Henry James' ghost stories fit the genre. It's mainstream/literary/horror, a book that crosses boundaries. I think genres are more useful for finding a kind of reading than describing a book - essentially, this is a very good book that people who read horror and people who would never consider reading horror would both like. It doesn't rank highly on the 'feel good factor' but it has a surprisingly happy ending -- one of those 'happy endings' that is about as happy as, all things considered, an ending can be.
I loved it - and think it's one of the best books I've read in the past year or so.
 unique addition to vampire literature November 7, 2007
Derek Tatum (Tennessee, USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I am not sure if "Let Me In" was truly a good book, or if it is because it is so different than much of the vampire fiction being published right now, but I found it fascinating. It is not for everyone - not so much for the violence (par for the course in these sorts of books) as much as the peek into damaged psyches. It's to Lindqvist's credit that he presents even the most revolting human beings as full-fledged characters and not just drooling, one-note lunatics. The vampire, Eli, is also that rarity in horror fiction - a sympathetic vampire who is by no means "good." Eli will attack and kill innocent human beings, yet still remains sad because of her loneliness; in this way, she reminded me of Miriam Blaylock in "The Hunger." Definitely recommended for fans of the weirder side of vampire fiction.
 Less Would Have Been More November 16, 2008
Jose R. Pardinas (San Diego, California United States)
9 out of 23 found this review helpful
Luckily this story was recently distilled into a Swedish-language film by director Tomas Alfredson with haunting cinematography and music by Hoyte van Hoytema and Johan Soderqvist respectively. The movie comes far far closer to being a vampire genre masterpiece than the novel upon which it is based.
The trouble with the novel is that author John Lindqvist rather than write the fractured fairy tale, with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, that he initially appears intent to do, veers off inexplicably and gratuitously into what I can only describe as a "tranny trope" which quite literally sucks the lifeblood out of his tale.
A riveting, tense thriller December 2, 2007
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Set in Sweden in 1981, LET ME IN provides a riveting, tense thriller revolving around a dead teen and a possible ritual murder spree. Add a pre-teen who hopes revenge has come for the bullying he's suffered and a strange new girl who moves in next door, who only comes out at night, and you have a vampire novel to rival Anne Rice's best: a tense thriller recommended for any general lending library where patrons request powerful characterization and vampire novels.
A warning for those who have seen the movie version.... November 5, 2008
W.Kim (Los Angeles, California United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The novel, (I've a used copy of the UK translation) is painted on a much broader (encompassing and developing characters that were quite secondary in the film), far wilder and much scarier. Perhaps it's the actress, but the cinematic Eli seems very human at times. In the book, you never forget that she's essentially inhuman.
The author has an interesting knack for making even the most reprehensible characters (worse than the vampire) sympathetic, including a zombie pedophile, sadistic violent children, and a crew of pathetic alcoholics.
I only wish the translator's prose style wasn't so plain, the story could definitely use a little juicing up - not in terms of plot, so much as language.
The current film adaptation's stays close to the first half of the book (though for reasons of emphasis, much has been condensed, compressed, combined and left out - esp. the supporting characters - who add a lot to the original story) up to about the halfway point in the story, when some disturbing possibilities hinted at by the author play out, taking the story in two potentially difficult to take scenes, into JT Leroy-ish, "The Heart is Deceitful Among All Things" territory.
Those interested in reading the book be forewarned. However if you can handle those elements, action and pure horror elements get more plentiful and far, far wilder in the second half of the novel. It's a far harder ride than the movie.
In a way this is a great response to the surfeit of Buffy imitators on the popular fiction shelves these days. After all you'd have to be in pretty f_@kin' dire straits to let someone as utterly "other" (not to mention lethal) as the book's Eli into your life. And Blackeberg (the public housing estate Oskar edures) ain't Sunnydale. It's gotta' enough monsters even without the supernatural ones. (Think, Hubert Selby-Lite, with Vampires).
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