Oh boy, I was majorly disappointed by this one. The ratings are so high, and it came highly recommended on social media. I can't believe the hype. 

Let the Right One In is about Oskar, a young boy who has a hard life. He's bullied in school, he's dealing with his parents' divorce, and he has a lot of rage building inside of him. One day, a young girl appears on the playground and introduces herself as Eli. She's filthy and strange, but she quickly becomes Oskar's only friend in the world. A ritualistic killing takes the town's attention by storm, but could it have something to do with Eli and her strange father?

There is so much wrong with this book, it's a little bit difficult to know where to start. This novel is way too long. It's over five hundred pages and I think the author could've told a better, tighter story if they were forced to cut it down to three hundred and fifty. There is so much unnecessary fluff in this book, and to a point I can understand why. The author isn't just interested in telling a story, they want to expand their world beyond that story, but as a reader I just don't care about anything outside of the "main" story between Oskar and Eli. 

For example, Eli is a vampire. That's extremely obvious from the very beginning of the book and I'm not going to act like it's a spoiler. To feed, she needs to drink blood, but her venom will turn others into vampires if she doesn't kill them afterwards. So, she kills a drunk guy who was leaving a bar alone. Easy, simple, not super relevant to the plot, right? Wrong. We get to see all of this guy's drinking buddies, and they're basically a third of the story. They're a bunch of drunks, they're broke, irresponsible assholes. They're all given names and characteristics and backstories, and one of them wants to investigate the murder. So, they go to another guy's house who saw the murder. This guy has an apartment full of sickly, inbred cats. This apartment is described constantly of smelling like piss. This guy saw the murder, but doesn't want to go to the police. There's another attack. One of them starts turning into a vampire. BLAH BLAH BLAH. This goes on for HUNDREDS of pages! I don't CARE about these characters! You could cut this entire thing and the only thing you would lose is some lore about what turning into a vampire is like. I thought it was going to lead to something like an outbreak and a city full of vampires because they wouldn't be able to control the spread. That would've been extremely cool, but NO!

I hated the entire story with Virgina and Locke and Larry and Morgan and whatever the cat guy's name was. It's so many unnecessary characters. I also hated every moment of reading from the perspective of Hakan. Believe it or not, I am actually okay with the fact that Hakan is a pedophile. Eli is hundreds of years old, but still has the body and the mind of a child. She, however, has the ability to make people love her or at the very least want to help her, and she utilizes Hakan's sick attraction to her to obtain blood. But why, seriously why, is there a whole chapter where Hakan goes to the city to hire a twelve-year old to assault? Why did I have to read that? Why was this kid described as having all his teeth removed so he could give better oral sex? It's just for shock value. It's utterly ridiculous that this is necessary. There's also an explicit sexual assault scene against Eli. It's horrible and hard to read and also unnecessary in my opinion. 

I also didn't care about anything having to do with Tommy and his step-father. I liked Tommy's end. That was genuinely horrifying. But I don't think I needed to read about Tommy sniffing glue or checking out porn magazines to get to that point. I wish he had more of a relationship with Oskar, and less "I hate my religious step-dad" garbage. It's not like his step-dad being a cop was relevant or anything.

Oskar's dad is also just not relevant. I understand the importance of building Oskar as a character, but he was already down-trodden enough without the chapters at his dad's place. Did his dad really have to be an alcoholic? He's already extremely severely bullied. How many struggles do you need to give this kid? I thought Oskar as a character was fine. I struggled a bit with the beginning of the story because Oskar's age was NOT DEFINED for a hundred pages. The blurb says he's twelve, and he does eventually say that in text, but for a WHILE I was trying to figure out how old this kid is. I think the bullying he's subjected to isn't unrealistic for the time period, though it is on the extreme end. His friendship with Eli is the most interesting part of the story by far, and really the only part worth keeping in my opinion. 

Eli is... hm. I think something went a little wrong with conveying Eli's actual ability set. Sometimes it seems like Eli is inhumanely strong, but sometimes she can be defeated with a kick to the ribs. Sometimes it seems like she has compulsion powers and sometimes it doesn't. She can shapeshift, but not entirely. I liked that she actually ascribes to the classic vampire rule of needing to be invited inside. That's a point of vampire lore I often see disregarded in favor of making them more terrifying. Eli also doesn't seem to have advanced durability but does have an advanced healing factor. That's kind of an odd combo. As far as her character goes, I thought she was fine. She's not malicious, just trying to survive and it's not her fault that includes killing others. It was quite sad to see that she really was just a child, but also not a child at all. Her brain physically couldn't age, but she still obtained experience. It makes her seem more inhuman, which I liked. 

I don't really understand why there was a twist in regards to her character's gender? Genuinely, this might be a cultural thing, but functionally it changed so little about the story. Oskar grappled with it a little bit, but honestly not in a very compelling way. I think it just was there to be shocking and uncomfortable. 

How is there still more wrong with this BOOK?! AH! Okay, so around the middle of the story there is a chapter that is not attached to anyone's perspective. At no point is there a name mentioned to tell us who is having these thoughts, so the only logical conclusion is that these are the author's thought in prose. It's extraordinarily racist towards Arabic and Middle Eastern people. It describes them as ugly and that they have barbaric rituals. I was genuinely baffled. It's like two full pages of anti-Arabic racism. Shocking.

The writing itself is pretty good and the atmosphere is grimy, dingy, and hopeless which is great. It's definitely the tone the author was going for. There's something good here! But it's like a hundred and fifty pages of good writing and character development in a five hundred page book. The actual horror elements were pretty effective, especially because they escalated as the book went on. From the acid melting someone's face to the murder at the morgue, these were truly well-described scary, gross moments. I can appreciate that a horror book actually got under my skin for once. I do have some questions about "monster Hakan." I don't think he was a vampire? Maybe he was? He didn't seem to die in the way a vampire would be able to, so I think he was something else. Eli described him as a kind of unresting spirit, I think, but I didn't really know what that meant or what the limits of his ability or mental capacity were. Is this another Swedish monster that just wasn't explained for a foreign audience? I don't know.

I can't in good conscious recommend this book. Maybe if you're a really desensitized horror fan? Eh, not even then. It's too long. 

Also a ton of the reviews on this book are like "Take that Stephanie Myers! This is how you write a vampire book!" Grow up. You are a grown-ass adult shitting on a young adult vampire romance. They are two entirely different demographics. You want thirteen year old's to be reading this extremely violent, sexually graphic book instead of Twilight? Get real. Different books are for different people, and Twilight didn't stop other authors from being able to write about vampires. 

Major trigger warnings for this book include sexual assault, pedophilia, rape, drug usage, alcohol and alcoholism, animal death and abuse, bullying, gore, child death, racism, self-harm, suicide, and human trafficking. Be warned

Very intriguing story that keeps you wondering what will happen next. Please check the content warnings before reading. There's some pretty triggering topics if you aren't prepared for them

One of my new favorite books. So beautifully written and packed full of twists and surprises 

One of the coolest vampire stories I've ever read, also perhaps the most disturbing thing I've ever read.

One thing I found especially interesting is the characterization of Elie - their gender expression was one of the fun surprises halfway through the book, but more importantly I like that theyre still 12, even though theyre a 200 year old vampire -pretty much all other vampire stories have their child vamps possess the mind of an adult, and it was interesting to see another expression.  Also the biology of the vampiric disease was FASCINATING!

One of the best and most disturbing books I've ever read. 

On the surface, it's a vampire novel, but once you look below this, it's really a book about the (perhaps unavoidable) evil of humanity and being an outsider in a society that wasn't made to accept you. It also had a lot of unexpected queer themes—deep down, the narrative of the main character Oskar is just the story of a young boy coming to terms with his sexuality. The character of Eli, the young vampire Oskar falls in love with, is also fascinating. The text refers to Eli intermittently as she and he, and though she insists multiple times that she's "not a girl", she still chooses to present herself femininely. It's very easy to read her as a transfeminine nonbinary character, even though these terms weren't commonplace when the book was written.

I don't want to say that this novel is completely unproblematic, especially when it comes to its queer representation. I won't go into much detail so as to avoid spoilers, but there are several harmful stereotypes employed in the narrative, and Eli's transness can easily be seen as something that was forced upon her rather than a choice she made. 

Despite these criticisms, I thoroughly enjoyed Let the Right One In and the way it grappled with heavy themes. This is definitely not a book for the faint of heart (be sure to check content warnings for this one), but if you're interested a good vampire story where the humans are the real villains, a portrait of 80s Stockholm suburbs, or a horror-genre exploration of growing up queer, you should pick it up. 

{Note: I read the original Swedish version, so I can't comment on how the English translation holds up.}

This is a really well-written book that I did not care for. There's dark and bleak and then there's this book. As an avid horror reader it takes a lot to make me want to skim certain parts of a book because it's just *too much,* but I felt the need to do that on multiple occasions. There was just so much in this book that didn't really need to be there, and in the process I felt the story dragging me down further and further into its well of darkness.