California Literary Review  Book Review: Harbor by John Ajvide
Lindqvist   October 10th, 2011 at 10:15 am    • Print Print
Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist by John Ajvide Lindqvist Thomas
Dunne Books, 512 pp. CLR Rating: ★★★☆☆  A Place Where Nobody
Goes: John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Oceanic Horror  Swedish writer
John Ajvide Lindqvist has made more than a slight impression on
horror fans, beginning with his fresh look at the modern vampire
narrative in his (2004) novel Let the Right One In. In his third
novel, Harbor, Lindqvist’s subject is neither vampires nor
zombies (as in his second work, Handling the Undead) but
something arguably both banal and extraordinary: the ocean.
Lindqvist’s newest effort reads like an elegant spin on H.P.
Lovecraft’s tales of mind-bendingly old and hulking
antagonists—at once legion and amorphous—threatening to devour
from below.  Throughout Harbor, we are reminded over and over
again of the relative newness of the Swedish archipelago where
the story is set. In one of the opening scen