Tag: horror

Two Stories: Nightjar Press

23rd November 2009 / / 3 Comments

‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ (2009) by Michael Marshall Smith
‘The Safe Children’ (2009) by Tom Fletcher

Nightjar Press is a new venture by the writer Nicholas Royle, specialising in individually-bound short stories. They’ve launched with two titles, one by a well-known writer, the other by a newcomer. Very handsome volumes they are — and, more importantly, the stories are also very good.

The well-known writer is Michael Marshall Smith, whose name is pretty much a guarantee of a good read, and ‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ is no exception. It’s narrated by a little girl named Maddy who hates the dark, so (she tells us) made a deal with her mummy that she could keep the light on all night, as long as she didn’t disturb her parents. But tonight, Maddy has woken up in darkness; what’s happened to her light?

The first thing to say about this story is that Smith gets Maddy’s voice pitch-perfect: with all the breathless sentences and repetitive structures, it feels as though this is a small child addressing us. And it’s the naiveté of Maddy’s viewpoint which is key to the success of the story. It becomes clear as the tale progresses that something strange is happening — and, all credit to Smith, it was something I didn’t see coming.  But we get some idea of what’s going on, even though Maddy doesn’t; the gap between her knowledge and ours generates great poignancy. It was with something of a wry smile that I closed the book, having read Maddy’s final words: ‘Mummy and Daddy do not talk much any more, and this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed.’ There’s a lot going on behind that sentence which I can’t reveal without spoiling the story — and I’d hate to deprive anyone of the superb reading experience I had with Smith’s tale.

Nightjar’s second launch title is the beautifully harsh ‘The Safe Children’ by a young new writer named Tom Fletcher. Set in western Cumbria, it follows James Thwaite as he travels to his new job as overnight security guard at a factory which makes… well, that’s a secret. The plot leads towards the revelation of the factory’s purposde, which is appropriately nasty — but that revelation isn’t enough, by itself, to make the story stand out.

What does make this tale stand out for me is Fletcher’s prose, the way he captures the fundamental bleakness of his setting. The story is set in the near future, and perhaps its main theme  is that of the promise of a shiny new tomorrow versus the failure of reality to deliver. Here, for example, is how James describes his train to work:

All of the seats are ripped; all of the tables are black with cigarette burns. Somebody is playing music on some portable device and it sounds like an insect trapped behind glass. The train moves slowly. I just stare out at the sea. Some things haven’t changed at all.

There are flashy, hi-tech trains and suchlike in this future world, but only in rich areas; where James lives, a couple are lucky if they can afford for both to eat at the same time — and the only hint of that shiny tomorrow is the shimmer of wet sand on the beach. The real horror of ‘The Safe Children’ is not the factory itself, but the socio-economic conditions that allowed it to come into being, and made people desperate enough to take jobs there.

Fletcher’s story is not without its flaws: the background details aren’t always integrated as naturally as perhaps they ought to be; they end up feeling ‘crammed in’, as though the story doesn’t give them enough space. Overall, however, ‘The Safe Children’ is an effective piece that marks Fletcher out as a writer for whom it’s worth keeping an eye out; he has a novel due to be published next year, which is now on my to-read list.

Also on my to-read list is anything that comes from Nightjar Press; if all its publications are going to be as good as these, they’ll need reading.

VideoVista review: Outlander (2008)

3rd October 2009 / / 1 Comment

The October issue of VideoVista is now live, and includes two reviews by me. The first is of Outlander, a movie which pits a village of Vikings against an alien monster. When I first heard of this, I thought it was an interesting twist on an old formula, and was disappointed that I missed the film at the cinema.

Now I’ve actually got to see Outlander… it’s okay, but doesn’t live up to its potential. I gave it 6 out of 10.

Click here to read the review in full.

Cern Zoo: Nemonymous Nine (2009)

27th September 2009 / / 2 Comments

Nemonymous, that annual extravaganthus of unattributed fiction curated by Des Lewis, returns for a ninth outing. As ever, the authors involved are listed only on the back cover; they are: Rosalind Barden; Gary McMahon; Amy Kinmond; Tim Nickels; Bob Lock; Lesley Corina; Jacqueline Seewald; Dominy Clements; A.J. Kirby; Brendan Connell; Daniel Ausema; Gary Fry; Mick Finlay; Robert Neilson; Steve Duffy; Geoff Lowe; Stephen Bacon; Rod Hamon; Lee Hughes; Lyn Michaud; Tony Lovell; A.C. Wise; Roy Gray; and Travis K. Weltman. But as to who wrote what, we can only guess for now.

The stories in Cern Zoo are a nicely eclectic bunch; this is true not only of their subject matter, but also of their relationships to the anthologys title, which range from close to non-existent (as far as I could see). Some tales take inspiration from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, such as ‘Being of Sound Mind’, whose retired narrator finds one day that a young girlk has inexplicably appeared in his house. He tries to work out what’s going on, whilst struggling against the tide of suspicion — and we readers have our own bit of detective work to do, to understand why the narration switches between first- and second-person. I think it’s fair to say that CERN aspect feels a little ‘tacked on’ (though it’s necessary for the story); but the rest is beautifully disorientating — to the very end, we can’t be sure whether all this is just in the narrator’s mind.

Other contributors base their stories around zoos. ‘The Lion’s Den’ tells of strange happenings in a zoo, beginning with a boy throwing himself into a lion enclosure. Of course, he’s set upon and killed — but no trace of him remains, not even a speck of blood. Then the lions are seen outside their enclosure, in places where it would be impossible for them to be — and so on. The zoo-related material in this story is fascinating; if based on actuality (as I assume it is), it reveals aspects of working life in a zoo that I had never really considered. And the events of the plot — and their implications — are powerful, all the more so because they remain mysterious.

Some of the tales use the image of chalk figures like the Cerne Abbass giant. One such story is ‘The Rude Man’s Menagerie’, in which Rebs, working on the remains of her late father’s Michigan tree farm, discovers the chalk figure of a man who appears to have drawn various animals to himself. The man appears malevolent, and Rebs resolves to free the animals — but how? This is a satisfying piece of fantasy that runs on its own internal logic; by the time reality comes gently free of it moorings, one is happy to go along.

In still other stories, ‘Cern Zoo’ (if it features at all) is really just a name. ‘The Ozymandias Site’ takes us to the Moon, where some future species (from the world of Cerne) has travelled to investigate the ‘giant leaping creature that once accompanied [them] in the universe’. No prizes for guessing that we are those long-gone beings; and the expressions of human folly in the story are rather unsubtle. But what makes this talew shine is the way it’s told, as it takes you into the minds of these strange creatures who have five-part personalities in the same body. I don’t think I grasped ‘The Ozymandias Site’ fully (understandable, I think, given the manner of telling!), but the journey was worthwhile regardless.

‘The Devourer of Dreams’ is another story whose voice is the star attraction. A successful writer looks back on his childhood in post-war Suffolk. His father, an innkeeper, suddenly developed a talent for writing, and produced several best-selling books. One day, the boy discovered the macabre secret behind this turn of events — a secret he went on to exploit himself. The plot of this tale is, to be honest, nothing particularly special; but the narrattion certainly is. The author pulls off a difficult balancing-act, creating a voice which convinces as that of someone (albeit elderly) living in the present day, yet has enough of a Lovecraftian touch to give ‘The Devourer of Dreams’ the menacing atmosphere of an old weird-fiction tale.

Last year, I reviewed the previous Nemonymous anthology, Cone Zero (you can read that review here), and thought it excellent. Good as some of the stories are in the present volume, I would say that the overall quality of Cern Zoo is not quite as high — not because there are fewer good stories in the present book, but because a greater proportion (there are 24 pieces in Cern Zoo, as opposed to Cone Zero‘s 14) don’t quite have that extra something (that’s my impression, anyway). So, for example, ‘Dead Speak, with its tale of an investigation into the mysteries of CERN, starts off interestingly, but seems to me to stop before it really gets anywhere. ‘Dear Doctor’ is amusing, but essentially nothing more than a shaggy-dog story. ‘Turn the Crank’, which tells of a mysterious organ-grinder, brings a variation of the ‘malign carnival’ trope into the present day; it works, but does seem a little over-familiar.

It’s worth noting that I am being only half-critical with those exampless; that’s because I’m not talking about bad stories as such, but stories that don’t reach their full potential. For all of these, there are other tales in Cern Zoo that succeed more fully: ‘Parker’ is an intense study of someone getting rather too excited about a pen. ‘Sloth & Forgiveness’ starts with a man climing a tree naked and encountering a talking sloth; it gets away with being ridiculous simply because it never loses its conviction. ‘The Last Mermaid’ is about Carlos II of Spain, and has a heady atmosphere; it hovers on the borderline of being nothing but atmosphere, yet it has a unique ‘flavour’, as it were. On the surface, ‘Pebbles’ appears a slight story, of a girl collecting pebbles from a beach and carrying them away in her jumper; but there are subtle clues which, if I interpret them correctly, hint brilliantly at what’s going on behind the words.

I’ll finish with my personal favourite story in Cern Zoo, which is ‘Artis Eterne’. This revolves around an old pub (‘The Cerne Abbass’) and one of its fixtures, a strange man called Albert; ‘fixture’ is the right word, because he never moves from his seat. He’s there throughout our narrator’s childhood, and still there when he returns for a work conference many years later. Apparently Albert decided literally to ‘live in the moment’, and to see how long he could make that moment last — and it would seem to be working.

‘Artis Eterne’ is a joy to read because so many of its elements work beautifully together. The prose is wonderful; for example:

I was born in the kind of parochial town whose aspirations held it closer to the nearest big city than mere geography. This same giant metropolis held our status as a smaller cousin in careful equilibrium, maintaining and coveting our local charms while at the same time sending out regular raiding parties of young adults who would drink too much and too loudly, making us feel like aliens on our own streets on summer weekends.

This strikes me as a very sharp observation of life in a satellite town in contemporary Britain. And there’s more to enjoy here than just the writing: Albert’s idea captures the imagination, but best of all is how it acts as a counterpoint to the protagonist’s life, and the gravity exerted by his (or her) home town.

I wish I knew who wrote this story, so I could track down more of the author’s work. But I’ll have to wait a while before I can do that. For now, I can — and do — heartily recommend Cern Zoo to you.

For more on Cern Zoo and Nemonymous, including purchase information, visit www.nemonymous.com.

Books from FantasyCon

21st September 2009 / / 2 Comments

Three points:

1. I’ve decided to get more into photography — not in any major way, just to practise a bit and see how well I can do.

2. Yesterday, I returned from FantasyCon with… er… ‘a few’ books in tow.

3. I’ve seen other bloggers do ‘books received’ posts, but never done any like that myself.

Combining all these three, I present to you some gratuitous shots of the books I got from FantasyCon. (I know they’re not the best possible photos, but I’m uploading them as they are to record what level I start from with the photography.)

FCon books 1a

FCon books 2a

FCon books 3a

As to when I’ll get around to reading any of these books: your guess is as good as mine…

Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan (2009) by Robert E. Howard

3rd September 2009 / / 1 Comment

Heroes in the Wind is a new volume from Penguin Modern Classics collecting together fourteen stories by Robert E. Howard, selected and introduced by John Clute. In a way, this development may be surprising: if you’d never read a word of Howard, what would you imagine his stories to be? Escapist potboilers with mighty-thewed heroes, perhaps? In a range of ‘classics’?

Clute asks a similar question at the start of his introduction: knowing what we do about Howard, should we — do we want to — read him? Yes, says Clute, because whatever else Howard was, he was a storyteller (literally speaking the words of his stories aloud as he typed them); and because he had more to say to us than bald synopses of his tales may suggest.

What do I make of that, reading Howard for the first time here in 2009, and being of a similar age as he was towards the end of his career? I cannot be as enthusiastic as Clute, but I do see where he’s coming from.

Let it be acknowledged first of all that the negative aspects we may anticipate — the stereotyping, the bloody violence — are indeed here; and, regardless of the distance of history, they make for unpleasant reading (to put it mildly). But, side-by-side with these, Howard’s fiction has what Clute referred to in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) as the ‘wind of Story’ — a restless storytelling energy that led to such dynamic passages as this charge into battle led by Cormac of Connacht (from ‘Kings of the Night’):

A wild roar answered [Cormac], and loosing rein he shot down the slope with five hundred yelling riders plunging headlong after him. And even at that moment a storm of arrows swept the valley from either side like a dark cloud and the terrible clamor of the Picts split the skies. And over the eastern ridge, like a sudden burst of rolling thunder on Judgment Day, rushed the war-chariots. Headlong down the slope they roared, foam flying from the horses’ distended nostrils, frantic feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, making naught of the tall heather…

I can’t deny the sheer kinetic force of such writing. Yet I find myself feeling ambivalent about these stories. I think it’s because I don’t find the positive qualities to which Clute refers to be as prevalent within the tales as I’d have liked.

Yes, I know: other people’s readings should have no bearing on mine; but this is one occasion where what I’ve read about the book (namely Clute’s introduction) has influenced how I read the book. I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing here, because Heroes in the Wind is Clute’s book as well as Howard’s; and I feel it’s only right to pay attention to his views on the material he has compiled.

Clute’s introduction is, incidentally, a fine example of what an introduction should do, which is to provide context and illuminate the book in a way that enhances the reading experience, rather than obviating it. How many times have you seen an introduction to a work of ‘classic’ fiction that starts with a warning like: ‘This introduction makes the plot of the book plain’ — or that does exactly that, but without the warning? Not here, thankfully.

The main positive qualities of Howard’s stories that I take from Clute’s introduction are the dynamism of telling which I noted earlier; and a certain sense of bleakness that gives the tales more of an edge. I see both of these qualities in the stories themselves; the trouble is that, too often, I found myself noticing them intellectually, rather than feeling them emanating from the prose (admittedly, this was more often an issue with the latter quality than the former).

The stories of Heroes in the Wind are grouped into three sections. The first contains early sword and sorcery tales with a number of protagonists, notably the Atlantean Kull, King of Valusia, and the Pict Bran Mak Morn. Though there is an energy about these pieces (they include ‘Kings of the Night’, from which I quoted the passage above), I get a sense of it being held back. In part, I think this is because the characters are held back somewhat (most especially Kull, who longs for the days when he was a warrior, free to roam); and of course Howard had less experience as a writer then.

What I think comes through most strongly in these first tales is a sense of horror at what lies beneath the skin of reality: most of them involve an encounter with supernatural entities from beyond (on a historical note, it’s fascinating to see how much thinner the line the line between sword and sorcery and horror could be eighty years ago than it is today). There’s also a recurring theme that time and civilisations will pass, that we are ‘the jest of the gods’ – but the full force of this didn’t come across the same.

The volume’s second section moves away from sword and sorcery; and it’s here, in ‘Graveyard Rats’, that I find Howard really hitting his stride. This is a horror story which begins with a man being driven insane when he finds his dead (and buried) brother’s head on the mantel and goes on to unravel what happened, and why. The momentum of this piece never lets up, and Howard smartly plays on our expectations; but I wouldn’t go so far as Clute does in calling it ‘an oneiric vision of how the world claws its victims into obedience and death’  — I don’t find the story quite as powerful as that.

Also in this section is one of the collection’s longest tales, ‘Vultures of Wahpeton’. John Middleton, the sheriff of Wahpeton, hires a Texan named Steve Corcoran as his deputy to deal with a mysterious gang known as the Vultures. But there’s more to the situation than meets the eye: Middleton is actually the leader of the Vultures, and makes a deal with Corcoran to double-cross the gang and split a hoard of gold. And the intrigues continue… Again, Clute is a good guide to the story — ‘we are left with a sense of the profound entrapping starkness of the world’ — but, also again, I do not feel this as strongly as he suggests. There is a bleak moral complexity to this piece: ‘Vultures’ could as well be a metaphor as the name of a gang; and, thanks to his background, even Corcoran’s moral code is more elastic than one would anticipate from a ‘hero’ (even taking into account historical distance). Yet, I keep coming back to that same stumbling-block: that something stops me experiencing this on a deeper emotional level. I’m coming to think  that I just don’t find Howard’s pulp style very effective in this regard.

On to the final section, and Howard’s most famous creation — Conan; and, straight away, I feel that the ‘wind of Story’ blows more strongly here than it did through the earlier sword and sorcery tales. Conan is a freer protagonist, and Howard’s telling is freer; ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ demonstrates marvellously what its genre can offer: the unceasing forward motion of the quest, and the fizz of strangeness and magic. I don’t think it works quite so well when we don’t travel directly with Conan (or Howard’s secondary protagonists)– for example, there are passages in ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’ in which past events are reported, and they don’t have the same impact as when we are ‘there’, so to speak; but, at his best, Howard is every bit the storyteller that Clute’s introduction promises.

I’d like to conclude by returning to a subject I mentioned in passing at the beginning — are these stories really escapist? I suppose, before I started Heroes in the Wind, I was expecting  to find bracing adventure stories within. What I found was something slightly different, something that I don’t feel is quite so well suited to being read for escapist motives; because these stories seem all too mindful that there is ultimately no escape. In this context, the fight of the warrior reads like a frantic attempt to beat back the inexorable tide of reality — the kind of bleakness to which Clute refers.  [EDIT 9th Sept: I’ve been made aware that my wording here is not as clear as it could be, so I’ll clarify. I was talking about escapism because it’s an accusation often – and often unfairly – levelled at fantasy. Howard’s fiction isn’t like that, which, in my view, is wholly a positive attribute.]

In the end, I have to say I’m rather ambivalent towards these stories as a whole; I see what’s good about them, but there isn’t quite enough of it in them for me. But there’s more to Howard’s tales than first appearances suggest; and his heroes will live on. I think it’s good that we have Heroes in the Wind as an overview.

One by Conrad Williams (2009)

11th June 2009 / / 2 Comments

Conrad Williams‘ The Unblemished was one of my favourite books of 2008; sadly, his new novel, One, doesn’t reach the heights of that earlier work — but it’s an interesting read with some very fine moments nevertheless.

The novel is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Richard Jane is a saturation diver working on an oil platform off the coast of Aberdeen, when the apocalypse occurs. Eventually making his way back to land, Jane’s only thought is to travel to London in the hopes of finding his young son, Stanley. He sets off, gaining along the way a number of fellow-survivors as companions, notably a hospital radiologist named Becky, and a five-year-old boy named Aidan. After the requisite trials and tribulations, the party reaches London, and the first part ends. The novel’s second part, ‘Lazarus Taxon’, takes place ten years later. Jane still hasn’t found Stanley, but he is now part of a group of survivors in the capital who call themselves the Shaded (because some form of shade, or depth, is what apparently saved them from the disaster). They have to contend with not only the pitfalls one might imagine would be found in a collapsed society, but also with something unimaginable — the Skinners. These are creatures grown from the spores that came with the apocalyptic ‘Event’, spores that invaded the bodies of the dead, distorted and animated them. Even a minor wound could turn you into one of them. There are rumours of a raft floating off the Kent coast, built by scientists and waiting to rescue people. Is it true? And what rescue could there be in this world anyway?

One is the kind of work which makes plain that genre distinctions (in this case, science fiction and horror) are ultimately limiting and artificial. There is a scientific underpinning to the ‘Event’, but it’s never explained in the story itself; Williams’ acknowledgements page refers to gamma ray bursts, so one assumes that’s what did for us here. But Williams is noted as an author of ‘dark fiction’, and his novel is tilted firmly towards that end of the spectrum; which, I think, is just as it should be — after all, if the average person got caught up in the aftermath of an apocalypse, they probably wouldn’t understand what had happened; and what wouldn’t matter nearly as much as what next? There are also scenes of great horror and carnage, that one is wary of visualising, in case they turn out to be even more horrifying in the mind’s eye than they are on the page. But this too is appropriate: One is horror because its subject is horrific, because there could be no response to what happens other than horror. Williams is not a writer of gore for gore’s sake; he understands the gravity of horror, and makes one feel its pull.

What I particularly like about One is that it’s intensely personal, despite the vastness of its backdrop; the novel is very much about relationships and character, and especially those of Richard Jane. There’s a pleasing complexity to his depiction; he’s not a straightforward heroic figure, but can decry selfishness in others whilst at the same time being willing to put his search for Stanley ahead of anything else (and if he’s doing this for his son, is it selfish or not?). Making Jane a diver was an interesting choice on the author’s part, as it automatically generates a certain amount of difference. It’s not just that the image of Jane wandering through the devastated landscape in his protective gear makes him seem like an astronaut exploring an alien world. It’s that being a diver (according to the novel) changes you, subjects you to pressures (figurative and literal) that others don’t experience, involves being away from home and in isolation for long periods, could lead to sights that others would never see (like the bends: ‘All the limbs withdrawn into an impossible core of pain. The welter of blood at every orifice, fizzing bright red. Bubbles opening in the jelly of the eyes’). The demands of his profession have driven a wedge between Richard and his (now ex-)wife Cherry; and Williams skilfully shows the thoughts and feelings of both parties, even as he writes only from Richard’s viewpoint — and the author is just as adept at writing about the personal as he is at depicting epic disaster.

Of the novel’s two parts, I think the first is the better: what could have been just a repetitive trudge through lists of examples of destruction and scavenged foodstuffs (I did wonder how long it would really be possible to survive in such an environment without proper medical facilities, having to travel mostly on foot and live off whatever tinned food you could find — but the strength of the telling soon put such concerns to one side), instead gains genuine power, most especially from Williams’ ability to evoke the reality of the situation, the sense that, whether or not Jane succeeds in attaining his goal, there can be no lasting escape.

The second part of One is still good but, as it’s necessarily more fantastical, it doesn’t have quite the same resonance — it doesn’t allow one to feel that this is how the world could become, not in the way that the first part does. Still, Williams once again creates that profound sense of unease which is the true affect of horror — an affect born not from blood and guts, but from the utter and irrevocable destruction of what we know. And the ending (which I’ll admit I didn’t fully comprehend) returns to the personal — which seems entirely appropriate for this very human view of world’s end.

DVD REVIEW: They Wait (2007)

3rd May 2009 / / 0 Comments

Time for this month’s update to VideoVista, and I have two reviews there. They Wait is a tale of vengeful spirits and buried secrets, set in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the festival of Hungry Ghost Month. Alas, it’s not particularly scary, creepy, or atmospheric; and I think the ending contradicts the beginning. It’s a mediocre movie, and so gets a rating of 5 out of 10.

Read the review in full.

Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In]

19th April 2009 / / 0 Comments

At long last, the much-acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In has made it to my local cinema, so I went along to see if it lives up to the praise. It’s certainly different, which is a good start; but I am having trouble deciding what to make of it, the reasons for which will, I hope, become clear. I’m even uneasy about calling it a ‘vampire film’ because, although a vampire is central to the movie, the tone and affect of Let the Right One In are so far away from those we normally associate with vampire films that it almost feels as though it doesn’t belong in the same category. For similar reasons, I wouldn’t describe this as a ‘horror movie’ — yes, there is horror, gore, even some scares; but they don’t seem to me to be the film’s main purpose. Let the Right One In feels more like a drama than anything else.

We meet twelve-year-old Oskar, a weedy kid who lives with his mother in a miserable-looking tenement block. He is fascinated by murders, keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and a dagger under his mattress, and play-acts attacking people. The reason he does all these things is because he’s being bullied at school. But it seems Oskar may have found a friend, in the shape of Eli, a girl of (apparently) his own age who has just moved in next door. She urges the boy to stand up to the bullies — which he does, striking Conny, his chief antagonist, around the head with a stick, splitting open Conny’s ear. Naturally, Conny doesn’t take this lying down, and seeks revenge of his own, recruiting his older brother to do the job.

Whilst all this is going on, Oskar is falling in love with Eli. Unfortunately for him, she’s not really a girl, but a vampire, responsible for a number of brutal killings, committed by both herself (simply grabbing hold of people and gnawing away at their necks), and her adult assistant (who gasses his victims, hoists them up, then slits their throats). As the nature of those killings may suggest, there’s a strong sense of realism about the way vampirism is handled in the film, with relatively little in the way of anything overtly supernatural (making that all the more effective when it does come — witness what happens when Eli tries to enter somewhere without first being invited in). This is also part of the larger visual style of Let the Right One In, which is very distinctive, with stark compositions and a washed-out palette. There’s also some good use of scenery, with (for example) the claustrophobic appearance of Oskar’s apartment building contrasting with the wide open landscapes of the countryside, where his father lives; which mirrors the contrasting emotions Oskar feels when he stays with each of his parents.

So, Let the Right One In has an interesting and striking approach and style; but I feel it falls down a little when it comes to telling the story. For one thing, the film focuses so tightly on Oskar and Eli and their relationship that surrounding elements can feel somewhat ; disconnected; this adds to the film’s ambience, but I did have particular trouble with the aftermath of Oskar’s hitting Conny — we know that the school rang his parents, but then Oskar’s school life seems to carry on much as it did before, which didn’t ring true for me.

Actualy, I think Oskar in general is the movie’s weak link. Lena Laendersson is thoroughly convincing as such an old, powerful being in the guise of a slight twelve-year-old girl (though apparently her voice was overdubbed, which I couldn’t tell); but Kåre Hedebrant’s performance as Oskar seems a little too ‘one note’ — I didn’t gain much sense of Oskar changing over the course of the film, when that surely should have been the movie’s key transformation.

Still, Let the Right One In is worth seeing, because it is the experience of seeing the film — its atmosphere — that really impresses (such that I’ll even let the movie off its deus ex machina ending). But it’s best to go in without any preconceptions of what it will be like. I suspect this is a film that wull reward repeated viewings, once you have a better idea of what it’s probably aiming for. Given time, of course, I’ll be able to find that out for myself.

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