Last month, I got Let the Right One In (link to film) from Netflix and was intrigued so much that I ordered a copy of the original book through interlibrary loan. Well, almost original. Since I don’t read Swedish, I got the translated version of the story.
First off, let me say that the movie and the book are very different animals. The movie is a little dark. We’re talking about child vampires, after all. But the book is much, much darker. The movie is like a Grimm story. The book is out-and-out horror. I read the book because I wanted to know more about Eli, the androgynous allegedly twelve-year-old vampire. And boy, did the book ever fill in the details. The movie is basically the story stripped down to its essentials. Characters that provide extra details are gone in the film. To be honest, I think I liked the movie a little more than the book because of the editing job.
Let the Right One In is about two outcast kids who build an odd little friendship. Oskar is one of those skinny kind of weird boys who gets bullied in class. He never finds the will to stand up to them and stop it. Eli is a two-hundred-year-old vampire who seems constantly on the edge of starvation. She has a Renfield-like character (but much more disturbing) who tries to help, but not very successfully. This book—and the movie—is really more about Oskar than the vampire. I think it’s about growing up and realizing that you have to take care of yourself sooner or later.
The book is very atmospheric. I’ve never been to Sweden, but I could almost feel the cold and the dark as I read the book. The story is set during the winter, in a modern suburb. The characters trudge through the snow so much that you could almost believe the global warming hasn’t arrived in Scandinavia yet. The story is built as you get pieces of information and conjecture from the various characters. It’s fairly obvious who’s responsible for the deaths and what Eli really is. The tension and what keeps you interested in the book is watching Oskar and Eli’s friendship develop, watching Oskar get stronger and learn to stand up for himself, and watching all the other characters try and figure out what’s going on.
It’s a good book, if not quite what I expected. I got interested in other books as I was reading it, and I had to nudge myself to finish before I sent it back to the other library. It wasn’t a bad read, it’s just that I felt that I had had a better version of the story in the movie version. I read somewhere that they’re thinking of redoing it. My thought was why? The movie is just about perfect.