This is the Post for the week of November 23, 2010.
I think this post will be a general response to “Let The Right One In.” To me, this was the best book of the semester. I know that is utter blasphemy for a King man such as myself, however, I think this book was an eye opener for the future of vampire works. One of the reasons I say that is that it is set in modern times (I see it in the 1980s) and that is soon enough in the past to be considered current events for me.
I like what the author did with this story. In one way, we have a traditional vampire in Eli, with his susceptibility to light and his need for blood to survive. But in another way, ELi is a hybrid of what vampires always were but somehow the literature has got away from. Eli is a supernatural hybrid creature who is not just vampire who can transform himself into many things but is also a human deep down inside. Eli was mutilated at the time when he became a vampire and because of this you feel sorry for Eli. Which brings up another question about Eli: What exactly is Eli and what is the author trying to do with him? One minute we see him as a girl, then as a boy, but in the end we realize he is none of these things. Does this mean that the author is trying to mold Eli into a supernatural god-like creature? Is the author, by removing Eli’s genitalia, giving Eli a quality of godliness which makes Eli more attractive to everyone and not to just one sex or the other. And by doing this, does this make Eli more of a tragic figure in the end? The truth is we do not know what Eli is and we are left not only guessing but wanting more of the story. There is so much more to Eli and we need to know more.
This is one of those things that makes this book so interesting and in my opinion the best book of the semester. The reader is not quite sure what to make of Eli. And I guess that is the thing that bugs us the most about vampires. We are not quite sure what they really are. We think we do but I think our thinking has evolved throughout the semester.