I read Little Star
because the first chapter was on offer at Tor.com and the description intrigued me. I am so glad I did. It is a dark, disturbing thriller. It’s indisputably a horror novel, but it’s up to the reader to decide whether it’s truly supernatural, because the characters are at once profoundly alien and yet they live in our world, and their lives take a direction where real people go.
(I will note that Alex Brown was less impressed by this ambiguity.)
Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let the Right One In
, and translated into English by Marlaine Derlagy, Little Star has the same clipped quality of Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who Went Boom books, but the prose is overall less clumsy and the story was deeply compelling.
This book, and the two by Christopher Beuhlman I’ve mentioned earlier, make me hope that straight-up horror, in the grand Eighties style of the books I reread last summer, might be making a comeback. What do you all think?
Here’s the cover:
