Helpful Score: 3
I have to say that after his first book, this one is really a let down. It keeps promising something but it never happens! Slow and very hard to stay with. Of course his characters are highly developed and I enjoyed their struggles, however SOMETHING needed to happen alot sooner!!
Helpful Score: 1
This was an excellent book. There were scary moments, but the real horror was in how the living acted towards one another and the undead. This book is a spiritual triumph; it made me think, shudder and cry. It also gave me hope in a world that challenges our faith in an afterlife. I read this book months ago and it is still with me!
As a reader of this author this book was not what I was expecting.
Slow, slow and slower.
It was hard for me to get into and connect with the characters and even the situation.
Yeah, I get that the dead have not come back to life in my life but gee, this was not scary, and not intense.
Just not my thing.
Slow, slow and slower.
It was hard for me to get into and connect with the characters and even the situation.
Yeah, I get that the dead have not come back to life in my life but gee, this was not scary, and not intense.
Just not my thing.
I thought this book started a little slow and confusing. But it ended in a lovely sweet, spiritual and very sad way. I thought it had many thought provoking moments that made it worth while to read.
I really enjoyed this book. I like this authors writing style. It was a very original storyline. It can be a little complicated as it does jump for character group to character group but keeps it entertaining.
Wow, what an abrupt ending. I liked the book a lot up till the last hundred pages or so because I really wasn't sure where it was going to end up going. And not in that really fun, unpredictable haunted house style, either. It started out as a great supernatural novel, who doesn't want to read a story about the undead, right? And then it took a turn. I'm not sure how I feel about death. Personally, I'm not scared of death. I don't cower in the corner when I consider my own personal oblivion. To me, it's just something that happens. There's no escape from it and I suppose everyone is free to feel however they want to about it, but there are certain things that I consider overly preachy or too much of a soft sell. I think that it is interesting to wonder about the "reliving" and whether or not having a soul or not plays into the day to day activities of reanimated corpses. This book wasn't preachy, but it did become very tuggy at the heartstrings. So much so that I thought the ending was a bit disingenuous. I thought that the way that the characters handled the reliving was perfectly natural until the last ten pages, pretty much. There were so many really hard hitting emotional elements that one has to deal with when their loved one comes crawling out of the grave, and most of the book handled them with such sharp focus that I wasn't prepared for Vaseline to be suddenly and inexplicably smeared across the lens. I'm wondering if something got lost in translation and perhaps some of the closing imagery is really uniquely Swedish and I had no real hope of understanding it. Or maybe I'm just a cold, emotional person that doesn't like to get feelings all mixed up in their zombie stories.
Lindqvist is a brilliant writer, don't get me wrong. He has a way of infusing things with such realistic emotion, and really making you feel a certain way about his characters. Even if that way is dislike.I think there's something for everyone in every single one of the people that inhabit this book. Would I recommend it to someone that loves zombie stories? Yeah. But I'd caution them that it's a pretty good one until it becomes what I imagine a Romero movie would be if it was produced by the Lifetime or Hallmark channel.
Lindqvist is a brilliant writer, don't get me wrong. He has a way of infusing things with such realistic emotion, and really making you feel a certain way about his characters. Even if that way is dislike.I think there's something for everyone in every single one of the people that inhabit this book. Would I recommend it to someone that loves zombie stories? Yeah. But I'd caution them that it's a pretty good one until it becomes what I imagine a Romero movie would be if it was produced by the Lifetime or Hallmark channel.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this book. It's not the run-of-the-mill zombie book where they are hungry for human flesh; instead, it's a story about love, mourning, and death. It does get a little existential at times, especially at the end, but I would recommend this book to any zombie fan.
