Harbor [Paperback]

I didn't know what to expect when I picked up "Harbor." I didn't enjoy "Let the Right One In," but I liked the premise here. To me, it sounded like a cross between the first half of "Shutter Island" and Stephen King's "Storm of the Century." (It wasn't, not really.) So I started...

And finished about twelve hours later.

"Harbor" is a highly atmospheric, original horror novel that has done something remarkable: even after you realize what the monster, the terror of the novel, is (this occurs about halfway through) I didn't think, "oh, that's what it is" or "oh, that's ridiculous" or "oh, the mystery's out, why am I still reading?"

That delightful anxiety produced by good horror ratcheted up another notch or two, and I thought, "What on earth are they supposed to do NOW?!?!"

Exactly what they do carries beautifully through the rest of the book. Not once did I feel bored, or let down by the object of horror here. Don't get me wrong, it had the potential to be so incredibly, ridiculously stupid. But Lindqvist turned it, "Night of the Living Dead" style, into a "no matter what they do, they're dead."

Another testament to Lindqvist's talent: he makes a major, god-in-the-machine plot line involving what is essentially a magic slug work. And not just work, but work amazingly. I still don't see how this works. It shouldn't be interesting. It should ruin the book, or at least be a line we impatiently skim over. But no. It's every bit as good as the rest of the book.

In a nutshell, the story itself is fabulous. The translation is excellent. I'm going to use the word "atmospheric" yet again. A pervasive sense of dread begins on the second page and doesn't let up once. "Harbor" builds slowly but steadily, til you're fidgeting with anxiety. All of the major characters are believable and well-drawn. For the first time in a lot of books, I had the sense I was reading about people, not just characters, down to the fact that he makes his quite average, bratty little daughter out to be an angel by the time she's been missing for two years.

As for cons, there are very few. Occasionally, the flashbacks pull you out of the story briefly (but that happened only rarely, and the flashbacks were otherwise fabulous). The ending (which I LOVED) will doubtless be seen by some as "too easy". Apart from that, and the fact that Anders was, at times, suspiciously clueless about what was happening on the island he'd spent most of his life on, I can't complain. "Harbor" was a fabulous novel, and I can already tell you I'm going to read it again.

"Harbor" opens with gut-wrenching immediacy -- the bewildered grief of parents who have lost a child -- then slows to a crawl as the author introduces the many odd and ambiguous personalities living on the island where the disappearance occurred, and then -- gets even slower. The author is neither a hack nor a Stephen King wannabe: as "Let the Right One In" demonstrated, he's his own man, and a writer whose talent breaks through even the occasional eccentricities of translation. But the menace here, revealed halfway through the narrative, is too abstract and unfocused to be threatening, and the jumble of other supernatural elements -- notably a centipede-like familiar called Spiritus -- only adds to the problem. The overwriting that was a minor nuisance in the earlier novel is a major problem here: there simply isn't enough going on to sustain 400-plus pages, and "Harbor" would have been twice as effective at half the length.

The Earth and its creatures consist mostly of water. When water gets its evil on, it is a formidable and dangerous element. Even without a supernatural infestation, oceans (particularly at night) are frightening to behold. In Harbor, John Ajvide Lindqvist imagines the waters of the ocean as a diabolical force.

In 2004, a little girl named Maja disappears while visiting a lighthouse with her parents, Anders and Cecelia. Her disappearance on the small, isolated island of Domarö is impossible to explain. When Anders returns to the island a couple of years later, a series of eerie events suggest that Maja is trying to contact him. Anders later learns that Maja is not the first island resident to have disappeared, and that the island harbors secrets from generations past.

Anders is one primary character; another is Simon, an aging magician and escape artist who has lived on Domarö for years. In 1996, Simon pledges himself to a Spiritus, a dark little creature that resembles a centipede. When Simon drools on the Spiritus, he gains some of its life force; holding the Spiritus in his hand empowers Simon. Despite Simon's connection to the island, its life-long residents have kept a secret from him: the secret of the sea. It is the secret that animates the novel and that Anders must eventually understand if he is to make sense of Maja's disappearance.

As the plot develops, John Ajvide Lindqvist surrounds his characters with menacing images: a cardboard cutout of an ice cream man seems vaguely sinister; the wind-swept sea conveys a feeling of dread; the distant growl of a moped signals danger. Even swans are best avoided on Domarö. This is artful storytelling.

Unfortunately the images of horror are more interesting than the actual horror. The problem, I think, is that there are just too many different manifestations of evil: the dead return to life in ghost-like fashion, the living are possessed in zombie-like fashion, a malevolent force dwells in the deep ... the riot of horror themes becomes a bit much, particularly with the addition of the Spiritus. While the Spiritus is the most imaginative of the supernatural forces at play in Harbor, its existence (and the role it plays at the novel's end) is almost too convenient. Having voiced that small complaint, however, I must give Lindqvist credit for tying it all together at the novel's end.

Harbor works best as a novel of psychological horror -- the horror not just of losing a child, but of a parent's realization that he never really knew his child. As a tale of supernatural horror, the novel is creative but not particularly frightening. The lengthy story is nonetheless entertaining. There are stories within stories in this unusual novel: stories of smuggling and stagecraft and love and Nordic adventure. Often the stories provide background, explaining, for instance, why two kids who went missing came to be treated as island outcasts and how Anders' father died. The stories of individuals confronting fears and hardships in an isolated environment showcase Lindqvist at his best, and provide sufficient reason to read Harbor.