One Thousand Words

Handling the Undead, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is advertised as a zombie novel. But it’s not about zombies, not really. I mean, there are people who died who become animated again, who imitate life, but the book isn’t really about them. And they aren’t the zombies popularly portrayed in media. They don’t hunger for brains, for instance.

The book opens with a bit about the weather. It’s been unusually hot in Sweden. Everyone has headaches. And then the electricity goes on and stays on, all appliances coming to life (so to speak), unable to be turned off. There’s a fantastic bit where a character is running, and his cellphone’s battery gains an extra bar of power as the battery refuels itself without being connected to anything. The weather breaks, the headaches ease off, and the dead start coming back to life.

Well. They animate. They imitate life. But they aren’t alive.

Handling the Undead isn’t really a story about zombies. It’s a story about death and dying and grief, about the human condition and souls, about letting go and moving on. It follows 3.5 story lines: David and his young son and the death of his wife Eva, the love of his life; Gustav Mahler and his daughter and dead grandson; Psychic grandmother and -daughter Elvy and Flora (whose storyline involves them separating then reuniting, hence 3.5 story lines). The book starts off with a bang and keeps the pace up consistently until the end, when it slows down and becomes more contemplative. It’s an emotionally difficult book to read, diving deep into emotionally troubling waters. The characters go through events that are both unusual and specific to them (I mean, there are ‘reliving,’ the formerly dead walking around, that is not an everyday occurrence) but also universal. Death. Loss. Pain. I cried several times while reading this book, and then kept going.

I highly recommend this book. It’s not at all the standard gory zombie fare, and most of the bits I as a reader flinched from were emotional bits, not visceral ones. There’s horror elements in it, well crafted, but it’s primarily an emotional journey, and a very well written one at that.

Mirrored from Thoughtful Consumption.