Recently, I decided to re-visit a book series I read in middle school: “Lennart Helsing” by prolific Swedish children’s book author Jesper Tillberg.
Synopsis:
Lennart Helsing isn’t a normal 11-year old boy. His family is completely obsessed with garlic-at their restaurant Garlic Heaven it’s served in everything, even the ice-cream. Unfortunately, the wider public don’t share their love for the vegetable and the restaurant is about to go bankrupt. To save the family business Lennart enters a cooking competition.
In the attic he finds an old cookbook with ingredients that can only be found around a Transylvanian castle. Lennart embarks on a journey to Dracula’s castle where he finds Louella, the daughter of Dracula. It turns out that Dracula and van Helsing were friends, not foes and that they had a plan to create peace between humans, vampires and other creatures of the night through writing a cookbook with recipes from monsters across the world, but before the project could be completed Dracula disappeared under strange circumstances.
Together, Lennart and Louella embark on a journey to gather recipes from mythological beings from across Europe.
The books are pretty crazy:
1. The protagonist wins a cooking contest by adding a few drops of vampire-blood into his dish.
Vampire blood is out-of-the-world delicious and addictive in large amounts, and consuming it heals injuries. Its mentioned that vampires would ironically be in danger if humans knew what their blood could do.
2. Louella’s father Dracula was the actual historical Vlad III of Wallachia. His wife Minira and daughter were captured by the ottomans and taken to a church where Minira was crucified on the cross. Louella managed to escape by jumping down a window.
3. Louella is a standard friendly vampire who doesn’t drink human blood (she drinks synthetic blood invented by van Helsing) but even a century of subsisting on blood substitute hasn’t eliminated her predatory instincts; she kills a man in self-defense after weeks of being starved in captivity, rips his throat open and drinks his blood. Thats pretty insane for any protagonist in a childrens story.
I had expected the books to be lame, but they’re actually pretty great as far as fiction for 9-12 year olds go. Swedish children’s fiction don’t shy away from gore, blood and disturbing themes and imagery as much as American and it really delivers on the “horror for children” front which I love.
by valonianfool