The last complaint is a bit more difficult to explain. We’re all on the train, you don’t have to keep laying down track. Also, not for nothing, but it takes around 100 pages for anyone to really start talking about vampires IN A BOOK ABOUT VAMPIRES. The first two complaints can be easily combined, I think there’s a version of this book with 50 fewer pages that’s a lot tighter and doesn’t waste so much time getting into the plane (we get it, it’s creepy, get in there already!) or with characters who ultimately don’t matter (far too many people at the airport turn out to have no real agency in the book).

I found them clear and exhilarating without being too confusing, which can happen when there’s TOO much action detail.īut I also thought it was too long, focused on some random characters it didn’t need to and felt less like a book and more like a movie. I dug the characters and thought they were mostly handled well and especially liked how the action scenes were written. It was revelatory as far as horror goes, though it definitely had some interesting ideas and tried to keep things scientific for the most part, treating them like an actual virus and drawing apt comparisons to existing organisms, which I appreciate. From there, it’s very slowly revealed to Eph what’s going on and we meet Satrakian, a man whose known vampires since his days in a concentration camp, a just-out-of-jail Latino kid named Gus, Fet the exterminator as well as Eph’s ex wife Kelly, their son Zach and some other folks. He and his partner Nora get brought in when a plane lands at JFK and, after being on the runway a few minutes, winds up completely dead, both power and occupancy wise. Our hero is Eph, a doctor with the CDC who leads a team of scientists whose main mission is to find and contain contagious diseases. If you, like me, weren’t familiar with the book, it’s about a vampire virus working its way through New York City. However, when I heard the basics of the plot and saw it on sale at Barnes & Noble for $6 or $7, I snatched it right up. I hadn’t heard much about it, but that’s no real surprise because I don’t really read a lot of horror books or stay up on book news as much as I used to. Anyway, The Strain is one of those books that I only started hearing about when it finished up earlier this year. I also think he really missed the mark with the Hellboy films, but that’s more of a fanboy thing.

I think he has a very distinct visual style and one hell of an imagination, but we just don’t jibe on what scares/fascinates/interests us. I’m not the biggest Guillermo del Toro fan in the world.

The strain chuck hogan