Mallory T. (fusillihead) reviewed on 10/17/2011

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.

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