John AJvide Lindqvist

Chills from the north... the swedish author talks about his new trilogy

anyone who ever had a traumatic caravan break when they were younger should probably avoid the decidedly spooky new novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I Am Behind You, the first volume in a new trilogy, begins with campers waking up to find themselves… well, who knows where?

“I have a great number of ideas and images jangling about in my head, waiting either to become connected or to be set off by a trigger,” says Lindqvist. “Here, the idea was a number of people in camping caravans that inexplicably get moved someplace else, but where? I toyed with a lot of different places, but it was when the image of the vast lawn with neatly cut grass came up that I knew I had a story.”

It’s this expanse, contrasted with the domesticity of the caravans, that gives the book so much of its eeriness. “I think the paradoxical play between claustrophobia and agoraphobia, being trapped in immense space, is the emotional core of the story,” says Lindqvist.

faking it

There’s also a sense of the past catching up with Lindqvist’s characters. When SFX suggests that to a greater or lesser extent we’re all faking it, Lindqvist doesn’t disagree. “Oh, but we are, aren’t we?” he says. “I think extremely few people feel that their perceived personality is a fixed matter or something genuine. We all construct our makeshift existence as we go along. We are all fakes. It’s just a matter of how deeply this is felt.”

If this doesn’t seem like the stuff of horror tales, that’s because Lindqvist’s work is often a balancing act in the way he writes popular, plot-driven genre fiction, yet works hard at getting at the psychological truth of characters. Is there sometimes a tension here? “Popular fiction without psychological truth or existential questions is without interest for me,” he says. “There’s too much of that.”

True, which perhaps explains why Let The Right One In was an international hit. The tale of a bullied boy, Oskar, and a centuries-old vampire, Eli, trapped in a child’s body, it re-energised the bloodsucker story by making it about frailty, loneliness and longing. Even now, 13 years since its first publication in Sweden, and following movie and stage adaptations, Lindqvist says he still finds its success strange. “I still can’t really understand what the thing is about that little story,” he says. “But I’m grateful. I don’t mind the ‘from the writer of Let The Right One In’. Most writers never get that one special book at all.”

mUSiC BOX

Let alone a book that references a Morrissey B-side, “Let the Right One Slip In”. What is it with his admiration for Mozza anyway? “Like a lot of other people, I had an intense relation to his lyrics at that age when you try to define who you are,” he says. “His voice meant a lot, so I stick to the guy. I read half his autobiography and then... well, you know. He needs the boundaries of a song. He knows too many words.” So Morrissey’s novel List Of The Lost, no. Next record, yes.

Which, it seems, Lindqvist will be happy to listen to at home after spending time on the road when he was younger, working as a magician and a stand-up who also wrote for other comedians. He definitely liked the scribbling more than going on stage. “Writing has always been my strength, not the performance part,” he says. “And I don’t like living alone in hotel rooms. So when I had the opportunity to make a living from writing, I took it.”

As for the Sweden that Lindqvist so often writes about, it’s a chilly place and not just because of the winter climate. We shouldn’t, says Lindqvist, get too idealistic about Swedish society, which many Swedes think changed irrevocably with the still unsolved assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. “When you go abroad, a lot of people think that Sweden is still what it was in the ’70s,” Lindqvist says, “the Social Democratic utopia that it never was, but at least there was the idea of that utopia. Now most of the talk is about how to deal with immigrants. As a writer, your material is dreams and ideas, so you become conscious of what place that material has in the political discourse.”

Not, it seems, that politics plays a big part in Lindqvist’s day-to-day life. “Me and my wife are both writers. We live in the countryside and apart from our big house, we each have one small house where we go to work every morning. The rest of the time we do things together, read aloud, play videogames or spend time with our son and his girlfriend. Sometimes people come to visit. That’s it.”

I Am Behind You is published on 7 September.