By James Keen
“Fear almost always triumphs over logic.”—The Final Disposal.
John Ajvide Lindqvist became a major figure in the world of horror fiction with the publication of his acclaimed 2004 vampire novel Let The Right One In, which was translated into English in 2007. His position as a unique creative force in the genre was cemented by subsequent books that dealt with familiar horror tropes to which the author added his own unique spin, such as Dealing with the Dead and The Port. This recent collection of Lindqvist’s short stories further demonstrates that the author is equally adept at delivering horror in a more concise form.
Border is a great start to an impressive collection of stories. It centers on Tina, a young customs officer with a surprising knack for searching passengers hiding all manner of contraband. Lindquist’s seemingly nonchalant approach to the subject matter leaves the reader with some truly perplexing moments and an unsettling climax. The Village on the Hill veers into familiar horror territory, emphasising dread as the protagonist is forced to come to terms with the bizarre truth about his apartment. Equinox takes the reader on an increasingly bizarre literary journey. Here we meet Veronica, wife, mother and professional crossword compiler, a religious, nosy person who admits early on that “I pray for the usual things: the ability to feel loved” and whose compulsive nosy urges lead her to discover some very strange and life-changing things.
Many of the stories the author presents here are fairly straightforward in concept, but his treatment of characters warps expectations and makes simple genre classifications difficult to follow. Some of the stories, as is often the case with short story collections, work better than others, but they all adhere to the author’s obvious basic intention to engage and challenge the reader. However, there are several frustrating short stories here, most notably “Holding You While the Music Plays” and “The Final Treatment.” The former is a thankfully short story that is annoyingly incomprehensible at the expense of any substance, and the latter is a bloated novella that intrigues at first but slowly—and I emphasize the word “slowly”—collapses under the ridiculous weight of the narrative itself. It’s neither stimulating nor particularly engaging, and aside from a few images that look like they were pulled from a particularly sinister fever dream, it ultimately reaches a disappointing conclusion that, for this reviewer, came too late.
The middling stories – “Majken”, “Eternity/Love” have some unsettlingly darkly humorous concepts and are mostly admirably absurd ideas that follow their own internal literary logic, while “Love” has some of the darkest imagery and certainly the most brutal themes in the collection. There is an almost constant sense of foreboding in most of the stories collected here, especially in the oddball “The Replacement”, which proposes a worldview in which we might exist in an everyday reality made up of a false humanity and the unsettlingly lifeless nature of interpersonal relationships. Lindquist’s ideas are curiously fascinating and cleverly arranged, and many of his characters share the same literary and philosophical obsessions. The problem with this approach to character development is that it leaves the author open to criticism that his characters have a lazy interchangeability, with little to distinguish between the multiple perspectives that the protagonists share with us.
Sustained focus, a story that employs a dreamlike logic, and an admirable intent to disorient and disturb rather than rely on overly dramatic gory prose give this work a distinct advantage over the standard collection of short horror stories. While often compared to Stephen King – a tedious comparison that seems to be something almost every writer writing horror must endure – it can be argued that Lindquist’s artistic sensibility has more in common with the early Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti. That said, this reviewer feels that if some of the stories were removed from this work, Let the Old Dreams Die would be a more balanced work, rather than the sprawling, unwieldy literary proposition we have here.
grade: 3.5/5
