The Strain – review

Authors: Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

First published: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: JFK International Airport, New York City:

Seated corpses faced them row after row after row. No evident trauma. No nosebleeds. No signs of poisoning. They were seated as any normal passengers would be, chairs in the full and upright position, still waiting for the fasten seatbelt sign too be turned off at the airport gate…

What took the lives of an airplane full of people?

Dr Ephraim Goodweather, Head of the Centre for Disease Control’s New York team, is racing to find out, but little does Eph know that the nightmare is only just beginning.

Abraham Setrakian is an elderly Armenian professor who understands the darkness that is descending. Many years ago, in the hellish barracks of the Treblinka extermination camp, he faced a horror more terrifying than death itself.

Before the next sundown Eph, Setrakian, and a motley collection of heroes must undertake the ultimate fight for survival. Should they fail, New York will be lost. And the rest of the world will follow…

The review: So, it is finally here – the del Toro vampire novel, first of a trilogy. The blurb sums up the story fairly well, we are talking a vampiric incursion of plague like proportions. Thus I do not intend to go into the story much more than where it touches the lore. As for the book itself, as a read, and I must admit I was worried. It was del Toro – I had built myself to this being released. I took the book to work with me, the day after it arrived and took an hour for lunch. The beauty of flexitime is that it didn’t matter when the hour morphed into an hour and a half. When I returned to my office a quarter of the book had been devoured.

The book is very readable, a good horror writing style and some interesting ideas. It is recognised, I guess, that in the vampire genre it is difficult to have totally original ideas – but it is what you do with the concepts, how you play with the lore that can be make or break. For the most part it is make but getting too referential almost made it break.

This is not the first (and won’t be the last) vampire plague type novel, the question always is why? If vampires have been around for centuries/millenium why is it only now (novel time) that the plague explodes exponentially – especially in a one ‘bite’ turns scenario. In I am Legend it was a new plague, a new disease. However, in something like They Thirst by Robert R. McCammon, where a vampiric plague overtakes LA, the answer was unsatisfactory. In this it was dealt with and the answer is embryonic but, given it is clear it will be explored in further volumes, momentarily satisfactory. It is an invasion – not of humanity but into other vampires’ territory by a creature who cares nothing for humanity.

Lore wise things are unusual. This is a viral infection carried by blood worms but definitely has a supernatural element to it. The virus changes the host to suit its needs and the blood worms will try to invade another host if the current one is destroyed. The genitalia of an infected male withers and falls away – thus putting paid to the sexy vampire myth. They defecate chemically whilst eating, being gluttonous in pursuit of blood. Their major organs are replaced. You notice I mentioned bite in inverted commas, the trachea becomes a long stinger like organ, projected from the double hinged mouth, with which they feed – I’ll come back to that.

Sunlight does destroy them. They have a hive mind connected to the master vampire and he is telepathic. They show up very hot on heat vision (rather than the standard cold). Silver is effective as a vampire killing device – in the form of a sword with which to decapitate them or silver tipped crossbow bolts with impact charges to remove the head. They cannot turn into bats, rats or wolves but tend to displace such creatures – which sense the evil I guess - and it is observation of this migration whilst vampiric attacks occured in a region that led to the metamorphosis myth. They do have to be invited (into a geographic location, not necessarily a home) and cannot cross moving water without human intervention (presumably only rivers and oceans as otherwise the sewer system running through New York would have proved a bugger).

Silver backed mirrors show them as a fast moving, almost vibrating. That kind of reminded me of Jacob’s Ladder and it is here where we fall over slightly. I could see moments that reminded me of Dracula - the plane itself was, for all the world, a little like the coming of the Demeter – a thought that struck me as I read those passages. The parasite/viral aspect was reminiscent of various works but definitely of Parasite Positive. Unfortunately it became a little too del Toro referential at one point. Clearly the stinger is reminiscent of the suction tentacle in the del Toro directed Blade 2. I actually quite liked this within the book, it seemed to take the concept and expand on it. However, when we got to the UV light bomb (and its blue light), which might or might not go off, it was clearly a Blade 2 reference too far and brought me up short as I was reading.

That said, it was one moment in a book I generally enjoyed reading. The question becomes, however, where will they take this over a trilogy and will it remain satisfying? It did seem that, after a good build up, the rush to the volume end confrontation was a little too hurried – especially as we know there are two more books to go. Time will tell whether the general good pace and quality can be maintained but I did like this as an action horror book. There was a nice use of daily life to expose the horror, some obligatory conspiracies and violent, hungry vampires that were the polar opposite of those romantic vampires plaguing the genre.7 out of 10.