So, onto my second book of the year. Actually, I started it in 2011, but it's taken me bloody ages to read. Not because I thought it was rubbish or anything, but trying to read a big novel over Christmas is nigh on impossible.
So, for background flavour - this is my 3rd Linqvist book. He is best known for "Let The Right One In", which has been made into a movie (twice). LTROI was a very clever and pretty unique spin on the Vampire myth. It was more a coming of age story than anything else. After reading that, I read 'Handling The Undead'. If describing LTROI as a vampire book was underselling it, then I'll equally undersell HTU by calling it a zombie book - but again, it was more to do with how humans deal with death and loss than anything else.
So, to 'Harbour'. A 5 year old girl completely vanishes on a small Swedish island, and her distraught father can't accept that she is gone - stumbling around trying to find the truth. I'm not a writer or a journalist, so I fear I will struggle to boil down the next 600 odd pages into a paragraph or 2 of review.
Suffice to say it involves old secrets, the sea demanding sacrifices, conjuring tricks, loss, and of course evil water zombies who speak entirely in Morrisey lyrics.
Did I like it? Yes - but only sort of. I felt it was about 150 pages too long. Another review I read, suggested that this book came out too soon as he was becoming more popular, and would have benefitted from a few more rewrites. Like 'Handling The Undead', I thought the ending didn't quite work either.
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