Review: I Always Find You by John Ajvide Lindqvist

As a boy, John Ajvide Lindqvist witnessed something strange; a young boy stumbled into his tree house, and had evidently been brutally mistreated. Deciding to house the younger boy for a time, John’s attempts at having a pet came to an abrupt end when the boy’s father, a policeman, found the tree house and threatened John; leaving a scar to buy his silence. Years later, trying his hand at being a magician harboured in a cramped and dank apartment, John begins to discover oddities which remind him of the boy, the treehouse, and the policeman with a knife.

Due to his sub-par housing, John must use a communal laundry room and rusted bathtub for bathing. As if an eerily abandoned and poorly lit bathroom across the courtyard didn’t have enough reason to be hair-raising on its own, strange happenings begin to occur in the laundry room, and his neighbours become embroiled in some activity behind the building’s closed doors – activities which alter their personalities and leave them adorned by a myriad fresh wounds.

Perhaps one of the most-frequently asked questions about true horror is what inspires the story? Bordering the line between realism and macabre fiction, Lindqvist’s answer is his own past, albeit it embroidered with a darker thread; a shadow that spreads behind the stitching. Lindqvist’s talent is so stark that it is often impossible to tell the line between his past and his imagination, making the story all the more powerful and sinister.

Lindqvist reels you in with easy style and dark humour, and what is heralded as the true story behind his career as a horror writer soon becomes impossible to believe, and disturbingly otherworldly. I am embarrassed to admit that part of me thought the author a madman, claiming horrific acts which shaped him into the world-renown weaver of tales he is today, so convincing was his writing and conviction. While, for the sake of his own ‘sanity’, I was relieved to scan ‘fiction’ in the book’s fine print, my utter speechlessness and distress at he content are one of many signs of Lindqvist’s talent as a creator and story-teller.

John Ajvide Lindqvist has a talent for making the morbid intriguing and classy, and dare I say stylish? He relies not on the shock factor which dampens many a promising horror, but on the pure threat that something impossible, something awful, could be real and unfolding in a damp corner of the world. It’s hard to resist his craft, particularly in the autobiographical offering of I Always Find You, and I daresay this book will leave you contemplating horror, nature and the weakness of the human mind when you are done. A brilliant, dark and addictive read – this is my kind of poison.

I Always Find You by John Ajvide Lindqvist is published by Riverrun books, an imprint of Quercus, and is available in South Africa from Jonathan Ball Publishers.