The Invisible

Wahl, Mats. 2007. The Invisible.

This is an international book only recently translated into English and published in the United States. It has also apparently been made into a movie. Since I don't keep up with these things, I depend on statements such as "now a major motion picture from the producers of The Sixth Sense" to stay informed. I also happened to notice that the movie is being released on dvd soon--very soon. Did I love this one? No. But it was a good book. It is your somewhat typical ghost-narrator story where the ghost has not "passed" or "moved" on and he's still haunting this world...viewing his friends, his family, and in this case following the police detective on the case of this "missing boy." Hilmer Eriksson was a somewhat normal kid--a teen--who went for a simple errand on his bike and never came home. Now it is up to Detective Fors to investigate and discover the grim truth about what really happened that Saturday. What makes this book good is the writing. While I don't really go for ghosts as narrators, this one is an exception for me because the style is so good. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I enjoyed it far more than I expected. (Though I know I'm in the minority, I don't really get the whole ghost-narrator thing as done in Lovely Bones.)

It was on one of the first days in May that Hilmer Eriksson discovered he had become invisible. (1)