beer good
Well-Known Member
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling The Undead (Hanteringen av odöda, 2005)
Engl transl 2009
Zombies. The living dead. In some ways the ultimate movie monster, horror stripped down to the bare essentials. Where werewolves are still human 28 days a month, ghosts are pitiable and vampires sexy, zombies are just pure personified death. Half-rotting corpses with little or no capacity for thought, stumbling along in large hordes with only one instinct: to eat the living. Slowly (up until 28 Days Later, at least) but so many and so determined that Death always wins out in the end.
...At least that's what they've been like since George Romero reinvented the genre in 1968. There's plenty of variations, but when you get right down to it, that's what happens: Death eats life. Except in Handling the Undead. Because when the dead arise during a sweltering heatwave in Stockholm they don't seem to interested in hurting anyone. The ones who still can amble slowly along the streets, thump at the doors of their widows, children or parents, not to eat their brains but just to come home. It's a simple idea, but immediately flips the idea of zombies upside down. When you no longer need to panic-strickeningly defend yourself against death, you have to face it instead, and so Handling The Undead becomes a story about how the living - from the individual bereaved who see their loved ones come back, to a government that hasn't faced wars or natural disasters for centuries - handle death, both metaphorically and practically. What does it do to our entire idea world to know for sure that death is not the end? Would you hand in your dead, but living, grandchild to the authorities for disposal?
As in all his novels starting with Let The Right One In, Ajvide Lindqvist uses the horror genre to just amplify reality, death to say something about life. Sure, he sneaks in references to everything from Revelations to Resident Evil, culminating in a beautiful flip on a standard zombie movie scene where all the zombies are fenced in to protect them from the living. But at the heart of it is the realism, the emotional connection to characters whose situation is just eeeeever so slightly exaggerated from the ones we all go through, and since the zombies are just as much Homo Sapiens as we, they become a perfect mirror of ourselves. Suddenly, the inevitable screams, stampedes and carnage (it's a zombie story, after all) isn't instinct anymore - or if it is, it's not an instinct unknown to us.
Sure, we end up with a plot hole or two, one or two stock characters, and it's not quite the revelation that LTROI was. But it's still a horror novel that manages to balance a profound understanding of why we tell horror stories, a realistic setting, and a plot that moves... well, not as fast as zombies in more recent movies, but every step it takes matters.
Engl transl 2009
Zombies. The living dead. In some ways the ultimate movie monster, horror stripped down to the bare essentials. Where werewolves are still human 28 days a month, ghosts are pitiable and vampires sexy, zombies are just pure personified death. Half-rotting corpses with little or no capacity for thought, stumbling along in large hordes with only one instinct: to eat the living. Slowly (up until 28 Days Later, at least) but so many and so determined that Death always wins out in the end.
...At least that's what they've been like since George Romero reinvented the genre in 1968. There's plenty of variations, but when you get right down to it, that's what happens: Death eats life. Except in Handling the Undead. Because when the dead arise during a sweltering heatwave in Stockholm they don't seem to interested in hurting anyone. The ones who still can amble slowly along the streets, thump at the doors of their widows, children or parents, not to eat their brains but just to come home. It's a simple idea, but immediately flips the idea of zombies upside down. When you no longer need to panic-strickeningly defend yourself against death, you have to face it instead, and so Handling The Undead becomes a story about how the living - from the individual bereaved who see their loved ones come back, to a government that hasn't faced wars or natural disasters for centuries - handle death, both metaphorically and practically. What does it do to our entire idea world to know for sure that death is not the end? Would you hand in your dead, but living, grandchild to the authorities for disposal?
As in all his novels starting with Let The Right One In, Ajvide Lindqvist uses the horror genre to just amplify reality, death to say something about life. Sure, he sneaks in references to everything from Revelations to Resident Evil, culminating in a beautiful flip on a standard zombie movie scene where all the zombies are fenced in to protect them from the living. But at the heart of it is the realism, the emotional connection to characters whose situation is just eeeeever so slightly exaggerated from the ones we all go through, and since the zombies are just as much Homo Sapiens as we, they become a perfect mirror of ourselves. Suddenly, the inevitable screams, stampedes and carnage (it's a zombie story, after all) isn't instinct anymore - or if it is, it's not an instinct unknown to us.
Sure, we end up with a plot hole or two, one or two stock characters, and it's not quite the revelation that LTROI was. But it's still a horror novel that manages to balance a profound understanding of why we tell horror stories, a realistic setting, and a plot that moves... well, not as fast as zombies in more recent movies, but every step it takes matters.