Handling the Undead

Book excerpt: The lights are refusing to go out all over Stockholm. There's a mysterious problem in the power system. Every appliance in the city is going at full blast and the entire population is struck by blinding headaches. The pressure builds to an intolerable pitch and then...stops. Moments later, in morgues and cemeteries across Stockholm, the dead start to rise. John Ajvide Lindqvist, the acclaimed author of the world's most original vampire novel, Let the Right One In, turns his attention to the living dead. Not the nameless zombies of classic horror but real dead people: mothers, children, grandchildren and spouses. Desperately loved, bitterly missed and now 'reliving.' Which is not, it turns out, the same as being alive. Lindqvist brings a deliciously ironic mixture of the macabre and the heartbreaking to the big questions of love and death. It makes Handling the Undead the must-read horror novel of the year.