Today we are going to tell you about the Swedish bestselling horror novel "Movement" by Jon Ayvide Lindqvist. This is a continuation of the novel "Himmelstrand", which, however, can be read as an independent book. Its main character discovers something terrible in the next shower room and helps to look into the eyes of his most terrible desires. The find eventually leads to the death of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
"-there was something in her, something that was...pure horror. Everything you were supposed to watch out for. Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes, Everything that his mom tried so hard to keep him safe from." ― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In
Formally, the new book of the main specialist in horror in Sweden, Jon Aivide Lindqvist, "Movement" is the second part of a trilogy that began a year and a half ago with the novel "Himmelstrand". However, from a practical point of view, this circumstance should not have special meaning for the reader: the only thing that unites both parts is the image of a parallel world - an endless green meadow, where it is always light, but there is no sun, and where the most secret, most terrible fantasies are realized. As for the rest, Movement and Himmelstrand are not connected either by plot, concept or even genre: if the first part of the trilogy is a classic existential drama in a thin shell of horror, Movement is primarily a social and even political drama.
In the fall of 1985, six months before the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, which shook the whole of Sweden, the main character and complete double of the author, a young man named Jon Aivide Lindqvist, comes from a distant suburb to Stockholm. Jon plans to become a magician (the author himself, by the way, started his artistic career as a clown), removes an uncomfortable closet a stone's throw from the cinema, where Palme will be shot very soon, works out tricks and looks for a stage for performances.
Things are not going well, and in order to while away the time on long lonely nights, Yon tries to put into words and write in a notebook an eerie and inexplicable story that happened to him as a child. At the age of twelve, he, the eternal object of school bullying and abuse, meets in the forest a boy of about five, who is obviously even less fortunate in life than himself. The boy is a victim of monstrous domestic violence, but (and this is much more important) at the cost of his own pain, blood and fear, he knows how to open the door to some other place where Yon passionately dreams of getting and where you can at least temporarily hide from all the hardships of the visible world ...
The matured Yon writes the text, which, as the narrator notes, is destined to be his first work in the genre of horror, and gradually notices that the reality of childhood memory in the most literal - or, more correctly, material way - seeps into his own life and the lives of his neighbors. In the shower room, located behind the common laundry room for the entire courtyard, something is living and dead at the same time, requiring human blood and in return giving a chance to meet a true, undistorted version of oneself and look into the eyes of its wildest and most disastrous desires. And these desires, the main of which turns out to be a craving for a genuine, non-illusory unity of lonely, disunited and unhappy people, become the secret reason for the death of Palme, a leader who beckoned his fellow citizens with the ghost of unity, but failed to keep this promise.
Habitual (and, in general, not unreasonable) when we guide Jon Aivide Lindqvist through the horror department, we repeatedly commit the same systemic error. In the famous conversation between Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman about the peculiarities of genre literature, the Nobel laureate draws a clear line between what he calls "a novel involving dragons" and "a novel about dragons." In other words, Ishiguro urges to see the difference between books that use certain genre techniques to achieve global and ambitious artistic goals, and honest, artless examples of the genre.
The problem, however, is that, by and large, we have learned to recognize such a difference only in the case of detectives - despite formal adherence to the canon, no one today will seriously try to drive Donna Tartt with her Secret History into the genre ghetto, or our Jan Wagner with the novel "Who Didn't Hide". All types of fiction, and especially horror, have a much harder time in this sense: behind the genre form, we often find ourselves unable to discern the content.
And Jon Ayvide Lindqvist, one of the most versatile and unusual prose writers in Europe today, is a prime example of this kind of false attribution. The high-quality chilling horror that he regularly produces (it is likely that while reading "Movement" you will find it difficult to wash in the shower), for him, nevertheless, is never an end in itself. Having destabilized, frightened and disorientated his reader, he uses his defenselessness in order to talk to him about things that are truly important, serious and global - about accepting himself (as in "Himmelstrand"), about paying for old sins (as in the novel "Star"), about love and loss (as in "Blessed are the Dead") or, as in the case of "Movement", about the sweet national unity as a great and dangerous social mirage.
This article was sponsored by Martin Kuklinski
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