In an L.A. Times article about the impending invasion of Norwegians – or something like that – is a brief blurb about author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up to LET THE RIGHT ONE IN being shopped around Hollywood; the book is a zombie tale called HANDLING THE UNDEAD, and considering what he did with vampires in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, it should come as no surprise that his story of the living dead is an unconventional one.
In HANDLING THE UNDEAD, Stockholm is overtaken by the undead after a period of strange weather, and the uprising has surprising consequences for several people, including David, a comedian whose dead wife comes back to life; self-harming psychic teenagers Flora and Elvy; and journalist Gustav Mahler, whose only hope of saving his daughter and himself from grief lies in exhuming his young grandson and hoping the boy will be reanimated.
So this not the usual zombie shuffle… And while the Times article isn’t meant to indicate that there’s some kind of done deal in place for Lindqvist’s book, we all know how popular zombies are right now – they’re like “Hansel” hot. A studio snatching up rights to HANDLING THE UNDEAD wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Now let’s wait and see if it actually happens.