Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column dedicated to doing exactly what it says in the header: shining a light on the some of the best and most relevant fiction of the aforementioned form.
Today, because I consider the entire month of October to be fair game for scary stories—and it seems my friends at Tor.com do too—we going to take in a spine-tingling tale by one of my favourite modern horror authors.
Though it isn’t his best book by any stretch—that’s Little Star by a large margin—John Ajvide Lindqvist first found fame with his debut, known as Let the Right One In in English. A smart and startling antidote to the era’s sparkly vampires which I expect everyone with an interest in solid horror has at least heard of, Tomas Alfredson’s film, shot from a script by the author, struck me at least as far superior to the source material.
Years later, the coming of age of poor, put-upon Oskar under Eli’s undying eye became an exploration of Owen and Abby in Matt Reeves’ neat if unnecessary adaptation of the adaptation… but whatever their names and nationalities, their bittersweet tale remains the same. Let the Right One In is a love story, of course, and in “Let the Old Dreams Die”—the short Lindqvist’s first collection takes its title from—we get a glimpse of what happened to the young couple after the blood-curdling curtain came crashing down.
Lindqvist isn’t content, however, to simply pick up where he left off. Instead, he circles the fate of Oskar and Eli from another angle entirely. Like Let the Right One In, “Let the Old Dreams Die” is “a story about a great love,” but not necessarily the one we expect. Rather than return to Blackeberg and the bloody mess Oskar and Eli left there, it takes place many miles away, and many years later. The events of the book and the movie are at least long gone, if far from forgotten:
A lunatic in the guise of a vampire killed three children in the old swimming baths—which is now a pre-school—and then abducted this Oskar Eriksson. The newspapers wallowed in what had happened for weeks and weeks, and many of those who were around at the time can barely hear the word ‘Blackeberg’ without thinking of vampires and mass murder. […] Places acquire a stigma, which then sits there like a nail stuck in your foot for years on end.
Though they do have something truly crucial in common with Lindqvist’s classic characters, “Let the Old Dreams Die” revolves around a whole other loved-up couple. Stefan, for his part, is the ticket collector who punched Oskar’s travel pass on the self-same train he and Eli escaped in at the conclusion of Let the Right One In. “I was kind of the last person who definitely saw him,” he says, and as such, Stefan was interviewed by the detectives investigating the horrific incident at the swimming pool that forced the young lovers to leave the region.
Karin was one of these—these detectives, I mean. As a matter of fact, that’s how she and Stefan met, and promptly fell head over heels for one another: in the interview room of the local police precinct. But though their relationship went from strength to strength in the subsequent years, the murders that made them, in a way, are still unsolved. Neither Oskar nor Eli has been seen since, thus the investigation is at a dead end. Despite this, Karin resolutely refuses to let the case of her career go:
During her last few years at work she had been allowed to spend time on the Oskar Eriksson case only as a concession. When she retired it was done and dusted, something of a hobby for Karin and nothing more. She would still ring her former colleagues from time to time just to check in anything new had come in, but it never had. The case was dead. Or so everyone thought.
The unnamed narrator of “Let the Old Dreams Die” is a stoic public servant who grows old alone over the course of what is a ridiculously ambitious narrative, which aims to take us in approximately 30 pages from the early 80s of Let the Right One In through to late 2008, in addition to telling three distinct tales in that short space: his, Karin and Stefan’s, and of course Oskar and Eli’s.
In any event, he lives the larger part of his adult life a few doors down from Karin and Stefan, simply “bearing witness” to the beautiful thing between them to begin with. They grow closer, though, eventually becoming fast friends, and in the fullness of time they let him in on a few heretofore untold truths about the Blackeberg murders.
Time is what “Let the Old Dreams Die” is interested in, ultimately. Time and what we do with it—or indeed don’t, as in our narrator’s case:
Time neither flies nor flows nor crawls along. Time stands completely still. We are the ones who move around time, like the apes around the monolith in the film 2001. Time is black, hard and immovable. We circle around it, and eventually we are sucked into it.
We are, perhaps. But who knows? Part of what made Oskar and Eli so special was that they seemed set apart from that. It may be that they remain so to this day…
In the past, I’ve often talked about the undermining of uncertainty in the horror genre. To be brief, I find that what makes scary things scary is first and foremost their unknowableness. Alas, to explain is evidently an almost irresistible impulse; one altogether too many horror authors resort to—resulting in the characteristically crappy conclusions of Stephen King’s fiction, for instance—but one Lindqvist winningly resists in this stalwart epilogue of sorts to Let the Right One In.
“Let the Old Dreams Die” is no simple sequel, and if the truth be told, I don’t know that I’d have wanted one of those. Instead, what we have here acts as an affecting post-credits snapshot, and tells a tale that would be touching and tragic and timeless even if it didn’t have anything to do with the book and the movie that made John Ajvide Lindqvist’s name.
Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful for The Speculative Scotsman, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He’s been known to tweet, twoo.
Given that MGM had a problem with the Bond stuff, would this maybe be why we later got the Vic Fontaine program? It let the producer’s play with Bashir’s 1960’s fetish, without treading too much on Bond territory?
A 9???????
After this episode was over, I turned to husband and said, “That is the WORST thing I have ever seen!” Like, this might actually be worse than Q-pid and that episode where everybody devolves because of the T-cells in their DNA (I am completely blanking on the title). The only thing that gets it to maybe a 2 or 3 is, a)the cast clearly having fun chewing the scenery and b)Garak getting to snark about what a spy’s life truly is. And I feel like we’ve already gotten quite a few episodes where the cast get to have fun playing different characters, so, honestly, I’m over that gimmick now.
But…ugh…not a fan of Holosuite episodes, usually not a fan of ‘alternate setting’ episodes (and I’m not that into the whole Bond thing to start with), and this was basically Bashir at his very Bashir-iest.
I mean, at least Qpid had John de Lancie…by the way, hope you had fun hanging with him!
Generally speaking I hate “the holodeck safeties are off” episodes, but I make a huge exception for this one. Like with “Little Green Men” a fondness for ridiculous 60s spy fiction really helps and this episode may hit even more marks than LGM did with its genre. (And krad missed one obvious homage which is right there in the title. Namely Our Man Flint which was half parody itself.) It’s a fun hour and it’s easy to just sit back and enjoy. OTOH, it might have been better coming after a bit of a serious stretch, rather than the third in a run of lighter episodes.
Of course, Garak’s running commentary and comparison with real spycraft does provide a bit of serious tone. He’s not in the least bit wrong about any of it, either. I wonder what he’d think of George Smiley.
I bet they could have gotten away with doing more of this. As noted, this was an entire genre, and just because Bond had more staying power doesn’t give MGM the rights to the whole thing. But they were probably still a bit gunshy from the Holmes debacle.
Lisamarie: I adore this episode. *shrug* And the one you can’t remember the title of is “Genesis.” :)
And I didn’t really get to hang with deLancie — I honestly barely saw him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
DemetriosX: I did too mention Our Man Flint, right there in the first Trivial matters paragraph….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
No problem, I am probably not the target audience for this episode ;) After all, I’m sitting here at a software company wearing duct taped glasses, snow pants, a sweatshirt and with my hair in a messy ponytail. Clearly, people here only love me for my mind ;)
You can spot Ira Behr’s footprints and love of old-school Hollywood all over this first half of the fourth season.
Much like Little Green Men and Sword of Kahless, this is the kind of episode that would never have been made back under Michael Piller’s leadership. This is much more suited to Ira’s sensibility.
This is also the episode that actually improves with repeated viewings, especially after having seen a lot of Bond or other flamboyant action/spy films.
When I first saw the title for this episode, back in 1995, I actually thought they were going to kill Bashir off for good. “Our Man Bashir” really sounded like a post-mortem eulogy.
Yo, KRAD: you mean Gert Fröbe, not Gert Forbe!
I love this episode (I guess I am the target audience) – it is just so silly – it’s really a breath of fresh air before all that is to come in the next couple of seasons.
Oh and tell your fiance to warm up the oven :)
Yes, well worth it just to see Worf in a tux! And damn the 24th century aversion to smoking. Our favorite Klingon needed a stogie in every episode, especially in combat.
By the way, ever notice how smoky some of the Klingon ships are, like the Bird of Prey in The Search for Spock? Come on, you know those guys stopped by planet New Cuba on the edge of the Neutral Zone before heading to Genesis. Or New Amsterdam…