Otherwise known as the it-really-freaked-me-out Swedish zombie one.
So Handling the Undead is the second book by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote Let the Right One In which was one of my favourite reads of last year and spawned one of the best films of 2009 (thoughts on the book are here, and the film over here).
We are in Stockholm; the whole of the population seems to be sharing in one giant communal headache as it what feels like a thunderstorm is approaching, and no electrical appliances can be turned off, so this is a group of people under some stress. And then suddenly it stops. And roughly at the same time the dead come back to life; well not all of the dead, only those who have passed away during the previous two months.
We follow what happens over several days through a small group of characters: David, a stand-up comic whose wife is killed in a car accident just before the zombie stuff starts, and is among the first to come back; Magnus, a reporter whose young grandson died in an accident several weeks before; and Elvy, recently widowed, and her grand-daughter Flora, who both have a paranormal gift and can tell what others are feeling. Not giving too much away here as these characters and their respective situations are all introduced in the first few pages and give the emotional heart to the book.
Now I will put my cards on the table here and say that I have always had a problem with the concept of zombies in that they totally terrify me. I don’t think I have ever been able to sit through a whole zombie movie. I can happily read/watch anything about vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beasties, but zombies definitely give me pause. And I think it’s because it could happen; not the living coming back to life as such, but large groups of people becoming violent through some kind of virus or something sounds all too plausible to me and I’d rather not think about it, thank you very much.
And certainly the beginning of the book played into all of that, being pretty gruesome and not a little frightening, and it’s probably my own fault that I got so freaked as I started reading the book in bed, a stupid thing to do giving everything I said above and perhaps I deserved what I got (but thankfully no nightmares).
But then it turns into something quite different. What do the reliving actually want? How would you react if someone close to you came back but weren’t quite right? How does a modern, liberal, enlightened western European nation actually handle a situation (the answer being not terribly well and far too slowly)? And how do people of faith deal with what could be a harbinger of the end times? Oh, and can love survive?
Sounds like heavy stuff but this manages to deal with all of these issues in a thoughtful way, and this is where the range of characters actually helps move things along as they all look at the situation from a slightly different perspective. And I was so keen to find out how this would all end that I finished the book in bed in the small hours of the morning, despite my previous misgivings. It is quite gory in places but not gratuitously so.
Highly recommended. And my third read for the RIP Challenge. And I may just have to look at this zombie thing in a whole new light …
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 1, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Jenny
Hm, very sensible of Lindqvist to write a smart, thought-provoking zombie book to go along with his smart, thought-provoking (I hear) vampire book. If zombies are the next big thing, zombie fans who are fed up with the schlock can always point back to this. 😛
This does sound interesting, but I’m a little wary because I dislike zombies a lot. A lot a lot. They don’t scare me, they bore me – so I don’t know.
November 8, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Susan
You just added another book to my list for Christmas!!! I must have this one. I have a thing about zombies too – I’ve dreamt about them attacking me (usually in shopping malls, and Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer helps me fight them off. Now that I write this, it sounds rather cool!) and I think it’s because they are brainless – they can’t be reasoned with, they are unstoppable, and in my mind, that’s what we become when we stop trying to live a life that has meaning for us personally. So I really have to read this book! Fabulous review, Bride.
February 6, 2010 at 7:05 am
World War Z « Bride of the Book God
[…] I’ve recently begun to find the literary versions rather interesting, starting with Handling the Undead, and now in World War […]
November 6, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Harbour « Bride of the Book God
[…] and reviewed his Swedish vampire novel (Let the Right One In) followed by his Swedish zombie novel (Handling the Undead) both of which were about considerably more than the tags I’ve given them here. Both were […]
October 24, 2014 at 8:31 pm
Let the Old Dreams Die | Bride of the Book God
[…] Handling the Undead – Swedish zombies […]