The Strain

Sometimes it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel and bring something new or breathtakingly original to the table. Sometimes it's enough to merely induce a course correction, to offset the current fad and bring the subject at hand back to equilibrium.

I would argue The Strain does just that with the vampire genre. The book takes a horror staple that has again become romanticized and softened and drags it back to where it belongs, to the darkness. The Strain is unabashedly content selling the notion that if vampires were real they would be ghastly parasites, creatures of death and darkness, of stench and rot.

In the book a passenger jet arrives in New York and promptly shuts down, without explanation, on the runway. Inside all but four of the passengers and crew are found dead, each victim found without signs of trauma or illness. It is, as you can guess, the beginning of the end.

In violation of a millenia-old truce one of the seven original "Master" vampires has launched an assault on North America. In his corner is the fierce speed by which the virus - for that is what it is - can be transmitted, and the reluctance of modern humans to grasp the truth.

Against him stands only two doctors from the CDC, an over sized New York exterminator, and a Holocaust survivor who first confronted The Master in the concentration camps of his youth.

I'm not a big fan of pseudo-scientific explanations for zombies/werewolves/vampires, etc. and so I would gladly have seen Hogan skip some of the biology lessons, but otherwise the novel was well constructed. Take note that the site of the World Trade Center figures prominently in the novel, something that some people will feel is objectionable - but where better for evil to breed than the place where it was practiced?

This is the first of three books planned between famed director Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, so as expected not much is resolved in this volume. But it does a fine job of introducing the threat and those who will rise to meet it.

Recommended.

3.4 out of 4

Here's a book trailer for the novel. WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AND LANGUAGE