I Am Behind You, John Ajvide Lindqvist

The central premise in I AM BEHIND YOU is simply delicious.  The environment is both alien and familiar and so are the reactions of the characters to their new altered reality.  It is impossible not to project yourself into this novel and wonder what your own behaviour and thinking would be like – would you accept, would you challenge, would you seek and be capable of escape?  Would you throw everybody else under the bus in order to keep yourself alive or would you stoically band together with your new comrades to fight the common evil that threatens you all?

A small or restricted setting will always sharpen the focus on the interactions of the cast (also small here) and this does present its own challenges. There needs to be a good balance of the present day conflict as to what each character will carry as baggage into their shared encounters. Lindqvist’s talent in exposing the truer nature of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances is evident once again in I AM BEHIND YOU.  The horror lays in how quickly in this apocalyptic situation that people will show their true colours, acting selfishly in order to protect themselves and their own.  Societal norms go out the window in a shockingly short period of time.  Suppressed thoughts, emotions, traits are all given freedom to rise to the surface and ride over the veneer of civility we all struggle to maintain.

The “woo-woo” inclusion in this novel did tend to be a bit aimless and certainly wasn’t its strength – the work put into character development was.  Not knowing what was memory and what the characters were seeing was annoying more than a few times.  The ethereal slippage between the worlds was interesting, though more resolution or explanation would have been greatly welcomed.

Dive in and question it yourself!