book review #1 ?
Nov. 5th, 2021 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maritimo hello. it's been a while since i last posted and i've been meaning to talk about this book since i finished like two weeks ago, but got lazy lolol. spoiler warning for everything of course, i'm gonna be going through whatever i feel like so. also i don't know how to organize my thoughts very well so please don't mind this mess. here goes book review of handling the undead by john ajvide lindqvist.
i had previous experience with this author first of all. i read his most famous novel "let the right one in" circa 2014, when i was like 13 years old lol, and enjoyed it very much. i've tried rereading since then but it's hard to get in the mood for it since it's pretty heavy, but i do remember thinking it was amazing. it's generally well acclaimed from what i know of, so a lot of expectation were put on "handling the undead".
for contextualization purposes: "let the right one in" is a subversive horror novel about an androgynous child vampire and a bullied boy with psychopathic tendencies, it is actually quite graphic and meant to make you uncomfortable, so i guess "real" horror. "handling the undead" is about what would happen if every person who died within the last two months in stockholm were brought back to life by a strong heat wave (lol).
i actually did try to read handling the undead right after i finished let the right one in, but only got through roughly half of it. this is important because, in opposition to annoying people, i did not expect or need this book to feel as violent and fast paced as the vampire one! this is one of the most obnoxious things i saw while going through the goodreads reviews, some people just voluntarily play themselves. a lot of people also had very basic rules they expected the "zombies" to follow, which obviously ended up being disappointing for them. these guys dont eat people!! still! i don't believe this book did as much as it could have, and change of direction halfway through kind of bothered me. as a wise random person said: i like this book more for what it proposed to do than what it actually did.
the narrative starts with electricity fuck up happening in stockholm: "It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o'clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down.". after the peak of whatever the fuck is happening, the dead have come back, aka the "reliving". the book follows three different nucleus: david, his 8 year old son, and his wife eva who dies in a car accident minutes before the dead rise, making her the most "lucid" of them; elvy and flora, grandmother and grandchild who share a telepathic bond (their assigned dead person is the grandfather, but they don't seem to give a fuck about him); and mahler, his daughter anna, and her small child elias who died almost two months ago.
i'm getting kind of tired of summarizing this stuff so to finalize it: the undead seem to not have a consciousness. eva has the ability to relearn human speech, given how little time she spent dead. the undead can trigger telepathic bonds between the people near them, and seem to respond to other people's emotions, for example getting violent when a person is disgusted by them. it's established that these things have very minor electrical activity going on in their brains.
things i think this book did well!
i enjoyed the world building very much. there's sections every few chapters with interviews with scientists, news papers articles, speeches given by politicians. i wish they had given more importance to this bit, it was very cool to read and it does make you wonder how government agencies would deal with all this bullshit happening.
mahler's part of the story is by far the best one. steals his mumified grandchild from his grave, and tries to navigate his turbulent relationship with his grieving daughter by taking care of elias with her. besides a few moments about eva, it is also the most graphic corpse action we get, since elias has been stolen he is in almost every scene, as opposed to eva and the grandfather who are under government care for most of the book. i think with this child/mother bond more could've been said about grief and moving on. but sadly the story took a different turn.
the bit with david, eva and magnus was also good. it focused more on how to deal with tragedies when children are involved. what do you do when your son's mother has died very violently but also has come back to life, and you don't know wether she'll recover and come home again. there's a very good bit about david seeing how life for other people goes as normal even despite this whole zombie thing, and wondering why it feels like he was the only one affected by this. and stuff like that.
animal death cw but one of the best scenes is when the reliving are finally allowed visits at the complex they're being kept, and david lets magnus bring the bunny he got as a birthday present. showing the bunny to eva results in said bunny getting beheaded by her in front of everyone. later when they are doing a funeral light for him, magnus says something like "it's my fault, i thought bad things about mommy and that's why she got angry". this whole reflection of emotions by the reliving is one of my favorite aspects of the story.
what sucked!
whatever flora and elvy had going on sucked lol. i felt that they added little enough that if the story was rewritten with them out, it could've been better. they're supposed to be our connection to the like... spiritual side of things which i genuinely disliked! at one point elvy thinks the virgin mary has spoken to her through a vision, and it ends up being the personification of death who wants her to free the souls of the reliving or whatever like Ok... it just wasn't good. and a lot of this talk about souls and the undead having emotions happens quickly at the end of the book, it felt very rushed and silly.
the lack of actual gore didn't bother me so much, but i agree that some more would've helped the general vibes of the book.
ummm what else... the thing about people seeing death and stuff was kind of stupid, like i really appreciate the idea, but it should've been used in a different book. actually you could definitely split handling the undead in two: the realistic approach to how people grieve and how the world would handle zombies vs the spirituality and heaven and all that stuff about what death is for every one.
if i could change this book!
basically i would write a different book. to be honest finishing it felt so frustrating because it was Almost a story i would've enjoyed, but it wasn't! i wish it had gone like... what if instead of it being about souls needing to be set free, and being able to telepathically converse with your child who died a month ago, nothing meant anything? specially with the mimicking of emotions and muscle memories, it would've been so much better to explore how a mother would deal with accepting that this is not actually her son, just a body who does what it did for many years. there's a very precious scene with elias and his mom where he starts suckling on his sippy cup and what this meant for them. i don't know. if i could make the undead become dead again after they reach the 2 months expiration date i totally would, and i believe focusing on the responsibility of caring for something dead that resembles someone you once loved dearly is very impactful. and with the science bit about the electric brain currents this definitely could've been achieved!! sometimes a power problem will make your dead wife come back and it's just a coincidence. that's my opinion.
To end this
so basically, i liked the book, and i do recommend other people read it. i like this style of writing despite everything lol, but i won't act like it's a very refined literature classic. i do wish it was a completely different story lol, it makes me so sad that this book doesn't do as much as it could, because it could've been soooooooo powerful it better planned out. i didn't explain things very well in this post though, there's a lot more to the narrative and it's worth checking out because i did not do it justice. also i'm gonna try to reread let the right one in again, but it's so fucked up idk if i can pull through just yet.
none of this has been proof read and i don't have spelling checking on for english so godspeed. thank you if you read it.
i had previous experience with this author first of all. i read his most famous novel "let the right one in" circa 2014, when i was like 13 years old lol, and enjoyed it very much. i've tried rereading since then but it's hard to get in the mood for it since it's pretty heavy, but i do remember thinking it was amazing. it's generally well acclaimed from what i know of, so a lot of expectation were put on "handling the undead".
for contextualization purposes: "let the right one in" is a subversive horror novel about an androgynous child vampire and a bullied boy with psychopathic tendencies, it is actually quite graphic and meant to make you uncomfortable, so i guess "real" horror. "handling the undead" is about what would happen if every person who died within the last two months in stockholm were brought back to life by a strong heat wave (lol).
i actually did try to read handling the undead right after i finished let the right one in, but only got through roughly half of it. this is important because, in opposition to annoying people, i did not expect or need this book to feel as violent and fast paced as the vampire one! this is one of the most obnoxious things i saw while going through the goodreads reviews, some people just voluntarily play themselves. a lot of people also had very basic rules they expected the "zombies" to follow, which obviously ended up being disappointing for them. these guys dont eat people!! still! i don't believe this book did as much as it could have, and change of direction halfway through kind of bothered me. as a wise random person said: i like this book more for what it proposed to do than what it actually did.
the narrative starts with electricity fuck up happening in stockholm: "It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o'clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down.". after the peak of whatever the fuck is happening, the dead have come back, aka the "reliving". the book follows three different nucleus: david, his 8 year old son, and his wife eva who dies in a car accident minutes before the dead rise, making her the most "lucid" of them; elvy and flora, grandmother and grandchild who share a telepathic bond (their assigned dead person is the grandfather, but they don't seem to give a fuck about him); and mahler, his daughter anna, and her small child elias who died almost two months ago.
i'm getting kind of tired of summarizing this stuff so to finalize it: the undead seem to not have a consciousness. eva has the ability to relearn human speech, given how little time she spent dead. the undead can trigger telepathic bonds between the people near them, and seem to respond to other people's emotions, for example getting violent when a person is disgusted by them. it's established that these things have very minor electrical activity going on in their brains.
things i think this book did well!
i enjoyed the world building very much. there's sections every few chapters with interviews with scientists, news papers articles, speeches given by politicians. i wish they had given more importance to this bit, it was very cool to read and it does make you wonder how government agencies would deal with all this bullshit happening.
mahler's part of the story is by far the best one. steals his mumified grandchild from his grave, and tries to navigate his turbulent relationship with his grieving daughter by taking care of elias with her. besides a few moments about eva, it is also the most graphic corpse action we get, since elias has been stolen he is in almost every scene, as opposed to eva and the grandfather who are under government care for most of the book. i think with this child/mother bond more could've been said about grief and moving on. but sadly the story took a different turn.
the bit with david, eva and magnus was also good. it focused more on how to deal with tragedies when children are involved. what do you do when your son's mother has died very violently but also has come back to life, and you don't know wether she'll recover and come home again. there's a very good bit about david seeing how life for other people goes as normal even despite this whole zombie thing, and wondering why it feels like he was the only one affected by this. and stuff like that.
animal death cw but one of the best scenes is when the reliving are finally allowed visits at the complex they're being kept, and david lets magnus bring the bunny he got as a birthday present. showing the bunny to eva results in said bunny getting beheaded by her in front of everyone. later when they are doing a funeral light for him, magnus says something like "it's my fault, i thought bad things about mommy and that's why she got angry". this whole reflection of emotions by the reliving is one of my favorite aspects of the story.
what sucked!
whatever flora and elvy had going on sucked lol. i felt that they added little enough that if the story was rewritten with them out, it could've been better. they're supposed to be our connection to the like... spiritual side of things which i genuinely disliked! at one point elvy thinks the virgin mary has spoken to her through a vision, and it ends up being the personification of death who wants her to free the souls of the reliving or whatever like Ok... it just wasn't good. and a lot of this talk about souls and the undead having emotions happens quickly at the end of the book, it felt very rushed and silly.
the lack of actual gore didn't bother me so much, but i agree that some more would've helped the general vibes of the book.
ummm what else... the thing about people seeing death and stuff was kind of stupid, like i really appreciate the idea, but it should've been used in a different book. actually you could definitely split handling the undead in two: the realistic approach to how people grieve and how the world would handle zombies vs the spirituality and heaven and all that stuff about what death is for every one.
if i could change this book!
basically i would write a different book. to be honest finishing it felt so frustrating because it was Almost a story i would've enjoyed, but it wasn't! i wish it had gone like... what if instead of it being about souls needing to be set free, and being able to telepathically converse with your child who died a month ago, nothing meant anything? specially with the mimicking of emotions and muscle memories, it would've been so much better to explore how a mother would deal with accepting that this is not actually her son, just a body who does what it did for many years. there's a very precious scene with elias and his mom where he starts suckling on his sippy cup and what this meant for them. i don't know. if i could make the undead become dead again after they reach the 2 months expiration date i totally would, and i believe focusing on the responsibility of caring for something dead that resembles someone you once loved dearly is very impactful. and with the science bit about the electric brain currents this definitely could've been achieved!! sometimes a power problem will make your dead wife come back and it's just a coincidence. that's my opinion.
To end this
so basically, i liked the book, and i do recommend other people read it. i like this style of writing despite everything lol, but i won't act like it's a very refined literature classic. i do wish it was a completely different story lol, it makes me so sad that this book doesn't do as much as it could, because it could've been soooooooo powerful it better planned out. i didn't explain things very well in this post though, there's a lot more to the narrative and it's worth checking out because i did not do it justice. also i'm gonna try to reread let the right one in again, but it's so fucked up idk if i can pull through just yet.
none of this has been proof read and i don't have spelling checking on for english so godspeed. thank you if you read it.
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Date: 2021-11-08 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-09 04:32 am (UTC)