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I Am Behind You Brings Disturbing Existential Horror into the Daylight
Four families on holiday at a campground wake up one morning to find the world around them replaced by an endless field of grass and an eternal blue sky, soundtracked by the music of pop songwriter Peter Himmelstrand. Missing are any sign of birds, the sun, or, perhaps most pressingly, food.
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At first, the circumstances are simply baffling—a puzzle the campers all have to solve their way out of before their supplies are extinguished. But as tension mounts and bizarre acts of vandalism begin to occur, the families spiral into paranoia and violent confrontation. Whatever stranded them in the field seems to possess intimate knowledge of their worst memories, delivering them in flashes out of their nightmares. Surviving the odd ordeal, and escaping their perplexing prison, means coming to terms with the worst parts of themselves.
I Am Behind You is a disturbing experience in existential dread from John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In). It isn’t horrifying simply because of the incidents of the plot, which goes from weird to worse. Lindqvist is a master at depicting twisted people falling to more twisted situations, but the setting he creates here is almost banal—like being trapped in an early ’90s screensaver. Yet there’s just something so inexplicable about the field: a setting so serene it becomes alien, the drama and horror heightened by the fact that whatever the field does, however it changes its occupants, it remains entirely unexplained and unknowable. Between the ultimately gruesome events that ensue and the space Lindqvist leaves for them to grow in the mind, I Am Behind You reveals itself as horror of a fiendish and inspired breed, and a compelling start to a planned trilogy from the Swedish horror master.
Lindqvist has a talent for depicting characters who have done despicable things without demonizing them. While disturbing images abound here, they’re all drawn from the campers’ minds, rooted in their pasts and past traumas. Carina, a wife and mother carrying dark secrets, suffers from violent, intrusive thoughts, and finds herself menaced by an emaciated black tiger encountered during a traumatic night out. Despotic, gun-toting control freak Donald, who quickly seizes the chance to act as an authority figure, is haunted by a childhood terror known as “the Bloodman.” While most of the campers (barring the one innocent, a kid named Emil) are screwed up, they’re screwed up in recognizable ways, whether their urges are self-destructive, combative, or defensive. Everyone has has experienced something terrible, everyone carries around the weight of guilt. Seeing these personal pains weaponized makes for a doubly disturbing experience.
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The everyday flaws of the protagonists are made more stark by the ambiguous plotting. While one or two mysteries are solved by the end, still more are left entirely up in the air, compounding the strangeness. The appearance of bloody crosses, bloody body-horror transformations, even the ways the field twists the laws of nature—the events all seems to follow a clear set of rules, and serve some grim purpose, but the reason behind the madness is barely glimpsed, at best. It’s a key detail much of cosmic horror misses— if the reader knows too much, fear becomes too easy to rationalize away. There’s frustration in not knowing, but Lindqvist does us a service by playing close to the vest, letting his monstrous images bite deep.
I Am Behind You is a book guaranteed to deliver lovers of dark fiction the foreboding, dread-soaked delights they’ve been hungering for. At the very least, it brings a new and utterly alien villain into the tradition of cosmic horror, and that alone is worth scaring yourself over.