Read this on your Ikea futon.

God dag min raring Bloggypoo!

At last! Sweden has something to offer the world besides affordable, cheaply made furniture to fill our college apartments.

And that thing is books!!!

Yes, you heard me right! Swedish people write books! I expect this kind of behavior from Norway, what with all their epic sagas and fjords and what have you, but Sweden? Where did that come from?

Personally, I blame this Stieg Larsson fellow. You may know him as the Swedish journalist and author of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the first in a trilogy of crime novels. You may also know that he is a dead man. This chap’s life was so controversial and mysterious that despite not having read the book, I feel safe making the bold statement that his story sounds far more exciting and curious than whatever nonsense he wrote about.

Anyway, our good friend Stieg made it cool and popular to be both Swedish and a writer, and now they’re all doing it. I say more power to you, Swedes!

Especially after reading Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s amazingly dark and creepy novel “Let the Right One In.” Extra props to this gentleman for naming his book after a Morrissey song.

This book is the anti-Twilight vampire novel. For starters, this beautiful little vampire girl, Eli, is twelve, violent, and once was a castrated boy. The human in love with her/him is Oskar, a psycho kid who fantasizes about stabbing the boys who bully him. A match made in heaven!

This book is dark. Grown up, Stephen King-style dark. I could argue that the ending is happy, if you consider the hero running away to help his vampire girlfriend murder people for blood a happy ending. For most of the book though, the boy is miserable. The vampire girl is confused and desperate. Every peripheral character, Oskar’s vacant mother, his alcoholic father, the glue sniffing hooligan downstairs, the local drunks mourning their friend killed at the hands of the wee bloodsucking monstrosity, all of them move through life in a haze of emotional mediocrity. Not wanting to throw themselves off a bridge, but not exactly elated either.

I have to say though, that’s what makes the book so interesting. Any avid reader knows that irritating feeling of figuring out how things will work out, or how the detective is going to solve the crime and catch the guy. It’s the same with watching movies and some people are better at figuring it out than others. A part regrettably comes when you guess the ending, and are just waiting for it all to work out, happily ever after.

Not in this book. The situations seem so dire, so melancholic, so horrific at times that the question stops being “How is this going to be resolved?” and switches over to “How could this possibly ever be resolved?” Sounds dismal, but at the same time, it makes for an extraordinary read. It is, after all, a horror novel, which is exactly the genre where vampires belong. Unless you’re talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In that case, vampires can be totally hilarious.

On top of being like NOTHING you’ve EVER read before, “Let the Right One In” is graphically descriptive. Sometimes to the point where you wish you weren’t eating a sandwich while reading. The language is both simple and piercing in its realness. The conversations dramatic and intense, not melodramatic and cheesy. This only serves to make the read more thrilling and unnerving. It isn’t some huge scale, supernatural face off. It’s the story of one little town, with a very small, and very dangerous predator walking the streets. What is it about a devil child that is so much more terrifying than the goriest monster? With the devil child, you don’t see it coming.

Do yourself a favor. When the movie adaptation comes out in the fall, ignore it. If you want to see an adaptation, watch the Swedish version, made my Swedes and made right. Otherwise, you’re in for just another Twilight clone with younger kids.