Little Star

One book critic said that Lindqvist is “Scandanavia's answer to Stephen King.” I'd say that's true. His writing is a lot like King's, for better or worse.

The bad: The book is overly long and poorly paced. It takes way too long for any major plot progression and way too long for the two protagonists/villains to meet each other. The prose is also a bit sloppy, with plenty of cliches and lazy descriptions (though maybe that's the fault of the translation).

The good: The characters of Theres and Theresa are horrifying. While the book isn't scary per se, their characters are frightening, in part because they're so evil and in part because Lindqvist did a great job of making you believe how they could become that way.

The book is shocking in many ways, not just in the scenes of brutal violence but also in scenes of bullying, online interactions, the way Theresa pulls away from her friends and family as she slowly becomes more sociopathic.

The book is told from many points of view, but the scenes of violence are normally told from the POV of the perpetrator of the violence. That means we're deprived of one kind of suspense and tension (fearing for the victim and hoping they can escape) and instead are given a different kind (horrified by how depraved and evil the children are).

That's why I say it's not a “scary” book. But it is an interesting one. And in the creepy-children subgenre of horror, children don't get much creepier than this.