BOOK REVIEW – I ALWAYS FIND YOU BY JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST

19/2/2019

Bizarre mix of autobiography and fantasy horror with a 1980s Swedish setting

“I Always Find You” is the sixth novel, to arrive in translation, from Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist who made an international splash with “Let The Right One In” back in 2007. Ajvide has written some impressive works since that startling debut, but none as whacky as this latest offering. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it tremendously, but it was very Swedish, by that I mean a lot of the story revolves around Stockholm and politics in the early 1980s and I’m not sure how well it will be understood and appreciated by non-Scandinavian audiences. My wife is Swedish, and I’ve visited the country many times, so I probably picked up on more of the cultural nuances than most.

Also, if you don’t know who Olof Palme is, I suggest you look him up on Wikipedia before reading. He was the Swedish Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1986 with the murderer never being caught and nobody was ever charged. The plot of “I Always Find You” makes numerous mentions to Palme, when the central character John Ajvide Lindqvist, arrives in Stockholm and votes for Palme’s Swedish Democratic Party, the first time he is eligible to vote. Later in the novel this plays a peculiar part of the story which may well split the critics. I’m not a Swede, and I found it strange, so I wonder how this bizarre turn of events played with a Swedish audience? Afterall, the murder of Palme was never solved and remains one of the darkest days in Swedish history so it’s odd that it turns up in a horror novel. However, plenty of novelists have tackled the JFK assassination, so I suppose ultimately this is no different and a natural equivalent for a Swedish author.

“I Always Find You” must rank as one of the strangest ‘autobiographies’ of the year. Sort of. On one level it tells the story of a young man John Ajvide Lindqvist trying to become a successful magician in Stockholm, he has few friends and struggles for money. He also enjoys shop-lifting and, most of the time, is pretty good at it. He also loves Depeche Mode. The author Lindqvist is writing about himself, he does not even try to disguise it, at one-point notes that he is still years away from writing his international bestseller “Let The Right One In” and makes other refences to the books he has yet to write. So, the narrative is obviously a strange one, but I enjoyed the oddness of it.

This is certainly off-the-wall and compelling stuff. If you had randomly bought this novel from a book-shop you may well become disorientated and it is probably best enjoyed by existing fans of the author who know, for example, in his youth he really was a talented magician. However, I loved the lonely voice of the teenage Lindqvist who lives in a dilapidated apartment block which seems full of weirdos, odd goings on, a random telephone caller who he often chats to asking for a guy he has never heard of, and whom has a failed brief relationship with a local student. There are also flashbacks to when he was a boy concerning a disappeared child, which are interpreted as the author’s early attempt at writing.

I enjoyed this autobiographical element to “I Always Find You” more that the supernatural or fantasy part which becomes more prominent in the second half, depending on how you interpret the goings on. I’m presuming the author is experimenting with mixing fact and fiction, perhaps even suggesting magical realism in the strange turn of events the novel takes. The supernatural is accepted with ease, little comment and no more than a shrug of disbelief is displayed. Lindqvist has no shower in his flat and has to use the communal facilities which is beside the laundry room and is constantly in use. Why is the big question? Before long, his dirty clothes pile up and he struggles to book a slot on the machine to clean his stuff but soon a neighbour invites him to join their club. For the entry price of a drop of blood….

John Ajvide is then encouraged to dip his bleeding hand into the bathtub and the strange stuff begins fairly quickly. Considering that until this point the novel had been written from the point of view of a young man trying to eek a living as a magician the plot shift was pretty dramatic. I’m not entirely convinced it was a success, but the author has certainly come up with something different and pretty unique. Again, it’s bound to elicit a lot of differing opinions, so make up your own mind.

You may ask yourself how often do horror authors infiltrate themselves as characters into their novels? We were wracking our brains about this at the Ginger Nuts of Horror and we think the answer is: VERY rarely…. The obvious example is a “Stephen King” character in the “Dark Tower” series, others include Brett Easton Ellis inserting himself in “Lunar Park” and although it’s not strictly horror “The Dice Man” by Luke Rhinehart, starring Rhinehart is another fine example. Do let us know if you can think of any others.

If would be easy to dismiss “I Will Find You” as an exercise in self-indulgence, however, I found it both entertaining and a return to form for Lindqvist who has gone off the boil in recent times with a couple of dull offerings; both “Harbour” (2010) and “I Am Behind You” (2017) missed the mark for me. Although it does not reach the heights of my favourite work, the stunning “Little Star” (2011) “I Will Find You” is a fine novel which must rank amongst the peculiar reads of 2018.

Tony Jones