John Ajvide Lindqvist created what may be the perfect modern vampire story in his 2004 novel "Let the Right One In," the story of a bullied boy befriended by a strange girl who is more than she seems, bonded by a shared sense of separation from the world around them. Few stories better encapsulate the tragedy of the vampire as a creature capable of intense emotion and humanity but unable to age, feel or permanently quell the urge to feed on human blood.
Lindqvist's monsters are a girl who isn't really a girl, and her caretaker, a guardian who isn't her father.
