Author(s): John Ajvide Lindqvist

Fiction

Oskar lives with his mum in a Stockholm highrise. He likes eating sweets and collecting stories of violent murder from the newspaper, and he has a slight incontinence problem. The kids at school call him Piggy and beat him up. Luckily, the new girl next door shows promise. Eli smells a bit and never seems to feel the cold and sometimes her hair has a lot of grey in it. So there’s a good chance she’s an even bigger misfit than Oskar. But her ‘father’ is another matter. There’s a whiff of something very bad hanging around him. Right after their arrival, a child’s body is found hanging from a tree, and amid the media frenzy other weird things start to happen. The police think it’s a serial killer. They’re so wrong.