Hanteringen av odöda (“The handling of undead”) is the third book for me by John Ajvide Lindqvist (having already read Låt den rätte komma in and Människohamn).

After hours of increasing tension and a strengthening electric field in the Stockholm area, leading to excruciating headaches and malfunctioning appliances, something snaps, and the dead come back from death. Not all of them, just the ones who died in the past two months, but that’s more than enough to shock society.

Unlike classical zombies, these ones are far from violent and have no interest in eating us. All they want is to go home. Instead of a battle to survive, we have a society struggling to somehow manage hundreds of rambling undead, and people trying to get to grips with their own reactions to the undead.

For some relatives of the recently dead, this seems like a good thing at first: your beloved wife/son/grandpa is back! But while the awakened ones may not be dead, they’re far from alive, which turns out to be harder for the living to cope with than proper death. When the body is broken, perhaps partly decayed, and the mind is in no better shape, what do you do? How do you react?

Turning the zombie story upside down is an interesting idea, and Lindqvist tells a good story. His realistic, quiet tone suits the story well. The yuck factor, while present, was relatively low, and there was enough suspense to make me want to keep reading.

I found it hard to read about the grief and the stories of loss, especially since two of the main threads were about deaths in a parent/child relationship. I have great difficulty dealing with such stories. But that’s just me, and even so, I liked the book.