Second books are, I admit, a curious phenomenon: mostly eagerly awaited, but often deeply unsatisfying. Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist is a case in point: after his middle-school vampire hit Let the Right One In, I fully expected that his next book (though nottechnically his second) would be equally satisfying. Boy, was I wrong. Lindquist has gone Stephen King on us. And not in a good way.
The Undead is what we would call today a hot mess: one day all the people who have been dead for less than two weeks in Stockholm come back to life. Authorities are soon overwhelmed trying to
corral them and get them something resembling health care (alert: no real political implications here). In the meanwhile, an elderly journalist tries to resuscitate his recently departed grandson; an older widow is getting ready for the end of times, and a comedian and his young son grieve for the mom who was killed in a car crash, but came back to...not life exactly. All this is a pretty regular set-up a la Stephen King: a gallery of characters assembled to face a common threat. Unfortunately, the end is also a la King: instead of doing something worthwhile with a good premise, Lindquist dissolves it into nothing really remarkable. The undead (or the "reliving" as the authorities call them to show their political correctness) die again, or go back to their graves, or death comes to the living in the form of their greatest fear, or zombies don't really eat people, or something equally trite.
All this is not to say that I'm not looking forward to Lindquist's next book. This is a genre writer of considerable skill and/or talent, as long as he doesn't let it go to waste (a la Stephen King).
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