I had seen The Strain in bookstores with no idea it was written in part by acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro. When I saw that I ran out to grab a copy and promptly devoured it. It’s smart, well written(with a co writer Chuck Hogan) and delivering fully on an idea Del Toro began in Blade 2. His vampires are predators pure and simple. Controlled in part by a demonic, ageless creature wearing the deformed body of a European noble named Josef Sardu.
What Del Toro and Hogan do really well is do their best to root their story in a sense of reality. Our hero, Dr. Eph Goodweather is a divorced father fighting for custody of his son, who happens to head the Canary Team for the CDC. A jumbo jet from Berlin is cleared to land at New York’s JFK and then the tower loses all contact. Eph is called in and in a masterful series of chapters we see the response to the dark airliner. It’s really pretty eerie. Eph and his partner board the plane and begin to make sense of it.
With the help of an aging vampire hunter, a pest control specialist and his partner and sometime love interest the team starts tracking down the threat. The book gets a bit repetitive towards the end where it’s one scene of vampire mayhem after another. But it’s a small portion of an otherwise very enjoyable book. Overall it’s a great first chapter in a planned trilogy. Here’s hoping part two and three are worth the wait.
[...] originally published in Rescued By Nerds on 2009-06-19 [...]