scripsi

I got hit by sinusitis and have spent two days basically sleeping. It’s a bit better, but as you don’t get penicillin for it anymore in Sweden, I’ll just have to wait it through, headaches and all.

Haven’t read much either. I finished Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, another Inspector Gamache novel. I’m a bit divided about it. I liked the murder mystery; a man obsessed with the unknown burial site of Quebec’s founder Champlain, is found in the cellar of a library. I have a penchant for historical mysteries, I enjoyed this bit very much. I also enjoyed the spillover from the previous novel where Gamache’s second-in-command returns to the village Three Pines to find out if the murdered they caught there last, really is the right culprit. I also really enjoy getting to know more about Canada's history, which is something I have very fussy knowledge about. what i didn’t enjoy was the use of a particular plot trope. The one where you are told in the beginning that something really awful has happened and then exactly what unfolds through the rest of the story. I really, really don’t like when this occur, either in movies or books. But that’s a very personal preference, so if you like that, you probably won’t mind.

Rörelsen (“The Movement”) by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I don’t think this book is translated yet as it is new, but Lindqvist is best known for his vampire novel Let the Right One In. It’s been filmed both in Sweden and in USA (As Let Me In. That book is one of the best vampire stories I have read. Lindqvist is just a couple of years older than me and the suburb he grew up in is just a few minutes on the subway from the one I grew up in, so his books contains a lot of pop culture references that I’m familiar with. It’s very eerie to read a vampire novel that takes place on a location you know very well.

However, Rötelsen is not his best horror. In fact, i would say it’s his weakest so far. The premises are good- a young man, Johan, moves into a small apartment in Stockholm, close to a tunnel that connects two parts of the city. It’s in late 1985, just a few months before our prime minister Olof Palme was shot, very close to this tunnel. And the young man gets involved in it, though a purely supernatural connection. so far, so good, and I enjoyed all the glimpses of the Stockholm I lived through my Teens in. But this young man is, according to the author, the author himself. This book “explains” why he writes horror movies and also “explains” who really shot Palme (the murder is still not solved). I found this way of telling a story deeply annoying. Also, Johan is a rather unpleasant character, and so is basically every single other personality you meet. It’s very hard to feel involved in a story where you don’t warm to anyone. You don’t get a very good explanation for what is going on either. I know it’s usually a bore when things are too well explained in a horror story, but this one leaves too much in the open. And I found it very disturbing to use Palme’s murder in a horror book. I went to the same high school as Palme's youngest son and I remember how awful it was after the shooting, with policemen all over the school for ages and him getting a personal bodyguard. So even if I can recommend Let the Right One In as well as

Paper Walls and Harbour, I can’t recommend this one.

What I have been watching The Devil Rides Out, yet another Hammer Horror with Christopher Lee. I was pleasantly surprised to find he was the hero in this one, and even if I didn’t found the plot particularly frightening, it still had a decent storyline which held together very well. You never know with old horror movies. Peter Grey was the villain and very good he was too, oozing a kind of oily evilness that was really creepy. The rest of the crew was rather blah, especially the Girl, who was utterly boring and probably got the role because she was good at looking frightened with very big eyes.