

A carregar... Handling the Undead (2005)por John Ajvide Lindqvist
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Top Five Books of 2014 (393) 100 Hemskaste (5) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. I've been spending some time in Stockholm recently so I thought I'd read some Swedish horror and who better than John Lindqvist who brought us "Let The Right One In" which was turned into one of the most powerful vampire movies I've ever seen (go here if you're interested). "Handling The Undead" gives an equally unique and powerful view on zombies. He uses the zombie tropes from "Resident Evil" or "Walking Dead" as pop-culture reference points and then pushes past them to something much more realistic and personal and therefore, much more disturbing. "Handling The Undead" imagines a freak set of circumstances where, on a particular day, all those who have died in Stockholm in the past two weeks reanimate and find themselves driven by the urge to go home. What follows is a thoughtful and emotionally taxing exploration of what it would mean if the bodies and some form of the minds of the dead we have loved and grieved over, came back. This being Sweden and not the USA, the authorities do not respond with guns and violence but instead are thrown into a debate about what to do with what they refer to as "The Unliving". Their task is made more difficult when it becomes clear that, in the presence of groups of the Unliving, normal people can hear one another's thoughts and experience each others emotions. This does not lead to peace and harmony. It was fascinating to watch the politicians discuss the rights of the Unliving while the army rounded them up and scientist tried to figure out what was animating the Unliving and to what extent they were sentient. The actions of the government are a like a news channel running in the background rather than the main focus of the story. The impact of the Unliving is made real through three stories. One is of a young child who's recent accidental death has left his young single parent mother and her father drowning in grief and guilt, unable to help each other. One is of a man who's wife dies in a car accident on the day of the reanimation and who must now cope with the impact of her return, broken and different, on him, his young son and his father-in-law. One is of a woman and her granddaughter, both gifted or blighted with second sight, who can feel the presence of the Unliving and struggle to understand what they can do for them. These stories are harrowing and difficult and focused on the living rather than the Unliving. In their different ways, they are all struggling to come to terms with the necessity of death to give life meaning and whether or not the bodies that has returned are anything more than an echo of the people they used to be. It is a strange and sometimes difficult book, not a light read, but a compelling mixture of grief and fear and hope. Not as mind-blowing as "Let Me In" but quite good overall. Both macabre and touching. I liked the premise of this, even though I felt like the actual mechanism was a little... weird. If it wasn't clear in the first couple pages, for a brief period of time in single city, the souls of the dead re-enter their shambling, broken bodies. They're Zombies, But Different! Okay, sort of cool. Like in Let the Right One In, Lindqvist divides his narrative... but I feel like he split it a few too many ways. I felt more like I was reading a series of split-up novellas or short stories rather than one cohesive narrative, and I could never get far enough involved with any of the characters to really... well, care. It was interesting, it was decently written (with some of the same weird syntactical choices that probably stem from translation), but honestly not all that memorable. Probably going to sell it at Half-Price Books. Sjuuukt bra. Det är lite ovanligt med en zombiebok som platsar i dramagenren, och inte i skräck. Dock är slutet lite eh.
Algo muy extraño está ocurriendo en la capital de Suecia: en medio de una inusual ola de calor, la gente se da cuenta de que no puede apagar la luz ni los aparatos eléctricos. De repente, una noticia sacude a la nación: en la morgue los muertos están resucitando. ¿Qué es lo que quieren? Lógicamente, volver a casa... Belongs to Publisher SeriesBastei-Lübbe-Taschenbuch (15913) Tem a sequela (não de série)
Something very peculiar is happening in Stockholm. There's a heatwave on and people cannot turn their lights out or switch their appliances off. Then the terrible news breaks. In the city morgue, the dead are waking up .... What do they want? What everybody wants: to come home. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
![]() LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumJohn Ajvide Lindqvist's book Handling the Undead was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Adira para obter um exemplar pré-publicação em troca de uma resenha.
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In his new novel, John Ajvide Lindqvist does for zombies what his previous novel, Let the Right One In, did for vampires. Across Stockholm the power grid has gone crazy. In the morgue and in cemeteries, the recently deceased are waking up. One grandfather is alight with hope that his grandson will be returned, but one husband is aghast at what his adored wife has become. A horror novel that transcends its genre by showing what the return of the dead might really mean to those who loved them.
This is not your typical zombie book. This is more about the families and loved ones of the ‘reliving’, as they are referred to in this book, than it is about the reliving themselves. If that appeals to you, I would recommend this book.
Through the three families in this book – David and his son Magnus, and the reliving Eva (David’s wife and Magnus’s mother); Anna and her father Gustav and Anna’s reliving son Elias; and Flora and her grandmother Elvy, and Elvy’s reliving husband Tore – different viewpoints on this reanimation are represented: it is the end of days; it is a miracle; it is a burden; and more. For some, it’s a sign that death is not the end. For the politicians, it becomes a debate about whether or not the reliving have any rights, and how society should deal with them.
This was not necessarily a scary or horror story – although there were moments that chilled me, they were rare and I don’t think the point or purpose of this story is to flat-out frighten. It’s a slow moving story but one that I couldn’t really put down. I was drawn to the characters (particularly David and Magnus) and could feel that the book was building up to something – there was so much tension and I wanted to read to the end and see what happened.
The translation seemed a bit clunky at times, particularly the dialogue between characters, but I do like Lindqvist’s writing and will probably read more of his work. If you’re interested in a different take on zombies, I recommend this book.
(From www.pingwings.ca) (