The book is a good work of fiction, but the movie is such a wonderful distillation of the most moving parts of the book that I found myself reading faster at points just to get to the parts that I most enjoyed in the movie. I’ll start off by saying that I personally liked the movie better, as out-of-character as that is to say. Given that, I thought I’d do a combined film and book review. I enjoyed both immensely, but for slightly different reasons in each case.

I’m not sure now if I heard about the movie or the book first, but unusually for me, I ended up watching the movie first, and read the book shortly after. Let the Right One In ( Låt den rätte komma in, translated by Ebba Segerberg ) was a bestseller in Sweden when it was published in 2004, and gained further international attention when the 2008 Swedish-language film adaptation ( IMDB) won a number of awards and became a surprise hit.

If you know anything about vampires, you can imagine where this is going. Two new neighbors move into Oskar’s apartment complex: one an older man, and one, apparently his daughter, an androgynous girl named Eli who smells terrible, walks barefoot in the snow, and only comes out at night, but is nonetheless befriended by Oskar. He is brutally bullied at school, and fantasizes often about striking back at his tormentors, keeping a scrapbook of newspaper articles about murders as his inspiration. Oskar is an alienated twelve-year-old living in a decaying Swedish suburb in the 1980’s.

Let me in lindqvist