John ajvide lindqvist biography of william hill
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Twelve-year-old Oskar is obsessed by the murder that's taken place in his neighborhood. Then he meets the new girl from next door. She's a bit weird, though. And she only comes out at night--Publisher's description.Tags
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I have a lot of issues with the latest string of vampire romances. Unless the vampire is Blade, she or he shouldn't be wandering around in the daylight without consequences. Even more problematic for me is the notion that anyone, immortal or otherwise, would voluntarily return to high school. Please.
Lastly, let me be clear: vampires are predators. They might also be nice to the occasional human, but at the end of the day we're food; expecting a close personal bond with every doe-eyed teenage show more girl who crosses the path of said immortal while humming vacantly to the latest Lady GaGa hit just seems completely unreasonable to me. Cats are predators, too, & yes, they play with the mice & the birds before killing them, but they eventually kill them. & eat them. Every. Single. Time.
This is not a book filled with pretty, languishing vampires. This is a book with one vampire who happens to also be a 12-year-old girl named Eli. Her human servant (for lack of a better term) is a pedophile. The fact that she also befriends another 12-year-old, Oskar, doesn't prevent her from killing & eating other people that cross her path & it shouldn't. For Eli the equation is simple: blood = life.
What isn't simple is the relationship that develops between Eli & Oskar. Even more complex are all of the relationships & half-relationships that litter this novel & people the soulless planned community where the a
The Blurb On The Back:
You thought you had put your worst mistake behind you.
It’s still there.
Molly wakes her mother to go to the toilet. The campsite is strangely blank. The toilet block has gone. Everything else has gone too. This is a place with no sun. No god.
Just four families remain. Each has done something to bring them here – each denies they deserve it. Until they see what’s coming over the horizon, moving irrevocably towards them. Their worst mistake. Their darkest fear.
And for just one of them, their homecoming.
You can order I AM BEHIND YOU by John Ajvide Lindqvist from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK. I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.
The Review (Cut For Spoilers):
Four families go on holiday to a Swedish caravan site.
Peter is a former football player (capped for Sweden) turned fitness instructor who’s unhappily married to bitchy model, Isabelle and father to young Molly.
Stefan Larsson runs a general store and worships his wife Carina (who is nursing a dark past) and together they have a young son, Emil, who enjoys playing with his toys.
America-obsessed Donald runs a saw mill and has been married to Majvor for many years and doesn’t treat his dog, Benny, particularly well.
Lennart and Olaf are elderly dairy farmers whose close friendship got closer after their respective wives decided to leave them.
But when they wake up the next morning, the caravan site is gone. Instead they’re in the middle of a strange field with blue skies and green grass in every direction but there’s no sun and something strange is coming over the horizon …
John Ajvide Lindqvist’s horror novel (the first in a trilogy and translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy) is a disquieting, creepy affair that’s built around slightly generic but still well drawn characters and even though there’s no real explanation for what’s happening and the resolution is vague, I was gripped enough
Progress, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote, is a storm. The winds that propel us forward also uproot and tear apart what we leave behind. The modern world is a world of progress and it leaves in its wake the ruins of the old world.
Progress, then, is indistinguishable from destruction – creative, positive and necessary destruction, perhaps, but destruction nevertheless.
Culture in the modern world has its own tales of progress. Mass production of the novel in the 19th century; the arrival and domination of cinema in the 20th; the omnipresence of the digital in this century – these all have propelled us forward. Newer and more progressive whims and approaches result in the ascendance of newer and more progressive authors and genres. And they also reproduce battered remains of literary forms and genres of the yesteryear. Or so it may seem.
This essay concerns a literary genre that should, by all accounts, be dead and buried. A coarse, primitive genre that, from the perspective of our unstoppably advancing tastes and proclivities, should have no place in the current pantheon of literary refinement and accomplishment.
But this genre continues to haunt the contemporary. Its ghoulish spectre manifests an incorrigible undead spirit; its menace threatens the narrative of unimpeded cultural progress. The genre I speak of is the genre of the dead and the undead, of monsters and malevolence, of spectres and sinister spirits. It is the genre of horror fiction.
Horror boom and bust
The so-called “horror boom” is behind us. This term refers to a period in US popular entertainment during which horror fiction nearly dominated the publishing and associated cultural landscapes.
Horror had been present, in one form or another, in the literary imaginary of the Western world from the onset of modernity – at least since Matthew Lewis’s satanic monk died a slow, agonising death and Mary Shelley’s deranged genius fashioned a body out of corpses.
Read mor Last year I read 12 books — one per month — by the late Irish writer William Trevor(1928-2016) as part of a project I co-hosted with Cathy from 746 Books. Immersing myself in his work like this, a kind of extended binge read if you will, was a fascinating experience. I learned so much about his writing and yet I still feel I know so little about him as a man. Or do I? Most people associate Trevor with the Booker Prize, for which he received five nominations over the years, but he never took out the top gong. He had better luck with the Whitbread Prize (now known as the Costa Book Awards), winning it three times (for The Children of Dynmouth in 1976, Fools of Fortune in 1983, and Felicia’s Journey in 1994) and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, which he won once — for his 1965 novel The Old Boys. He had an honorary CBE and a knighthood too. But that’s not why I wanted to devote a year to reading his work. Trevor has an esteemed reputation as a fine chronicler of human life in all its many facets and was regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the English language. But he didn’t just write short stories. He wrote novels, novellas and plays, too. Since beginning this blog almost two decades ago, I have read and reviewed a few of his novels and found them heartbreaking (The Story of Lucy Gault), slightly disturbing (Felicia’s Journey and Death in Summer) or gentle depictions of rural life (Love and Summerand Nights at the Alexandra). It wasn’t until I’d read three of his early novels — The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966) — published in one volume, that I understood there was more to Trevor than the melancholy tales I had previously associated him with. Those early novels were satires, up roaringly funny in places. All were set in London, rather than his na A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023 Award-winning writer