Britt Holmstrom

The Man Next Door Britt Holmstrom

How does a mild-mannered man become a killer? All he wants is to be left alone, but it is not to be. After a childhood of severe neglect and trauma - with a Nazi-sympathizing swine of a father and a dimwitted promiscuous mother - Sven grows up to continue the isolation that is the only way of life he knows, plagued by memories from the war, when his father was arrested for collaborating with Danish Nazi-sympathizers. Self-exiled from human companionship, Sven suffers from a paranoid bunker mentality; he is afraid of everything and everybody. It is not until new neighbors move in next door that his secure isolation and cherished tedium comes to an end with results far more tragic than even he had imagined. "Time passes and goes away somewhere, somehow, until the sight of the dead body, a wet stain spreading in front of his jeans, starts to bore him. It's getting dark. The streetlights are on, reflecting in the window on the landing. He hears the swoosh of car tires on wet asphalt. That means it's raining. 'I killed a man and then I noticed it was raining.' That sums it up. And speaking of sounds, that reminds him. He can't hear the baby crying. Must have have cried himself to sleep, poor little bugger. All alone. Again.