H = Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist

 

"The chill came at him. The corridor he was standing in was several degrees colder than the rest of the hospital. The sweat on his body congealed into a cold film, made him shiver."

There's a heatwave in Stockholm and nobody can shut off their electrical appliances. There seems to be an electric pulse in the air and the headaches won't stop. David loses his wife Eva in a car accident and is so grief stricken he can't bring himself to tell his son. Elvy takes care of her vegetable of a husband for years and is slightly relieved by his passing. Gustav Mahler's grandson dies in a tragic fall, leaving him without a purpose. And then the dead wake up.

I loved this story. It wasn't just another zombie-apocalypse, running and screaming and hiding from mindless murder machines. It wasn't the kind of horror that made me look over my shoulder, but it left me sinking into my blanket with a chill up my spine.

What the dead want most in this story, isn't brains, it's to go home. And David is on board with that; Eva is the love of his life, he doesn't know how to live without her and he can't bring himself to tell his son that his mother is gone... So if Eva can just get better, just come home, it'll all be alright. Elvy isn't so enthused; at her wedding she agreed to take care of Tore in sickness and in health and she feels she more than fulfilled that bargain. Now that he's back, she doesn't want anything to do with him. Gustav on the other hand, is absolutely desperate to have a second chance with his grandson, a chance to right the wrongs. When the authorities start rounding up 'the reliving' Mahler takes Elias, and his daughter Anna, on the run.

The scariest thing about this book was that it was an emotional look at what would happen if someone you loved/hated/grieved came back from the dead and which scenario would be worse? If they could come home or if they couldn't? And how far would you go to protect someone who technically, wasn't alive? We're given three very different characters who are all going to have to answer those questions for themselves. Authors who tackle the subject of zombies usually focus more on the mindless monster theme. The focus here is the living.