On things that go bump in New York

My lovely friend Natasha who works at a lovely bookstore recently sold me a copy of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain, the first in a trilogy. Although it had not been all that long since my last infusion of vampire novel, I read it anyway, just in time to get all excited about the news that it is being turned into a TV series.

Anyway, The Strain is a vampire series that is in many ways more like a zombie story, in that it goes way back to the vampirism-as-plague legends--the vampires multiply rapidly, are very unsexy, and all but the oldest are pretty animalistic and not all that articulate. Vampirism here is sort of a virus that acts a lot like an extremely fast-growing cancer once it infects a host.

The plot starts when a large plane lands in New York's JFK airport and everybody on it is stone dead, except for four people who are only mostly dead. Everything else looks totally fine, and the people don't immediately seem to have been killed in any particular way--they are just all dead. This is when our hero is called in, our hero being Dr. Ephraim Goodweather from the CDC, head of something called Operation (or Project? I don't remember) Canary, which is about containing biological threats before they can become pandemics. There is a lot of creative medical stuff about what exactly happens to the bodies for this particular iteration of vampirism. It is deeply, deeply creepy and very gross, so I do not recommend reading it while eating dinner, which is how I read about half the book, because I do not learn.

Stuff gets even weirder when the four surviving plane travelers start going around biting people, and when the dead bodies in the morgue disappear. Dr. Goodweather and his sexy partner (there is always a sexy partner) team up with an old pawnbroker who just so happens to also be a Holocaust survivor who tried to kill the Master vampire while incarcerated in Treblinka and after the war dedicated his life to studying and hunting vampires and particularly trying to hunt down the Master. It is super convenient for him that the Master landed on his doorstep in New York and that neither of them picked anywhere else in the country to settle down it, innit? Anyway, a colorful bunch of other secondary characters show up and learn things about the vampires, mostly before getting eaten by them. There is also a pretty awesome rat-catcher who helps them out, since the young vampires have to live underground during the day and end up behaving a lot like rats and other city pests.

As you can probably guess by the fact that there are two more books in the series, the book does NOT end with our intrepid heroes killing the Master and all of his descendants and Crisis Averted, Let's All Go Home Now.

Overall, I really liked this book, and I did find it quite genuinely creepy, although I do find some of the marketing claims that it Totally Redefines The Vampire Story and Is 100% Mind-Blowingly Original and Is Not At All Cheesy just because it is not a paranormal romance to be... ill-researched. There is a bucketload of stuff you will have seen before if you read a variety of horror/gothic novels. But there is enough newish stuff, and the story is told well enought, that overall it holds up as a pretty scary and entertaining read.

The Museum of Creepy Crawlies

Darlings, I just finished reading libbabray's new YA gothic fantasy novel The Diviners, and it is pos-i-tute-ly the cat's pajamas! I am in possession of an ARC, courtesy of the lovely Gina, and of a first edition hardcover signed by the illustrious Ms Bray herself, whom I saw at the Burlington B&N last night with blackholly and Sarah Rees-Brennan. I also got a lovely pin that says "KEEP CALM AND FLAPPER ON," in the color scheme of the book's cover (purple, black, and white), and a necklace from Ms. Rees-Brennan made out of what appears to be either a UK or a Canadian penny.

Miss Evie O'Neill is an outgoing seventeen-year-old flapper from Ohio with a magical ability: she can read objects. After she gets in trouble by using her ability and ruining some local hotshot's reputation at a party, Evie's parents decide to punish her by sending her to live with her weird bachelor uncle Will, who is the curator of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult... IN MANHATTAN. Evie's parents are not so bright, methinks. Evie pretends to be sad and goes off to MANHATTAN IN THE TWENTIES, which is so fabulous I had to put it in all-caps. There, she meets a number of other bright young things, many of whom also have magical powers: Theta Knight, a Ziegfield Follies dancer, who can apparently kill you with her brain (although she has only done this once)! Sam Lloyd, a dashing young con man/pickpocket who is searching for his mysteriously disappeared mother and can make people not see him! Mabel, the daughter of some really famous union organizers, who dresses terribly and is goofy for Jericho! Jericho, Uncle Will's assistant at the museum, who is a total Strong Silent Type and generally is no fun at all until you learn more about his awesome steampunky secret which is so awesome I will not tell you what it is (but it is super steampunky)! Memphis Campbell, who I shouldn't be listing this late in the list because he is actually probably the second most viewpointy viewpoint character, but who Evie doesn't hang out with that much; he is a numbers runner in Harlem and an aspiring poet and he used to be able to heal but can't anymore, so he looks out for his clairvoyant younger brother instead! And a bunch of other people, because this is a big sprawling fabulous ensemble cast sort of book.

Anyway, Evie and her hip friends are flappering it up in Manhattan, but unbenownst to them, a different bunch of bright young things have accidentally summoned an evil spirit named Naughty John! Naughty John starts killing people in gruesome and very occult-y ways, removing parts of their bodies (turns out he eats them), staging them in particular positions, and marking them up with strange symbols. Uncle Will is brought in to consult on the case, and Evie and Jericho (and occasionally the others) decide to help him. Evie also capitalizes on this opportunity to tell a sleazy reporter what a hip and happening place the Museum is and all that jazz, to drum up some business out of this Pentacle Killer scare. Evie & co's research brings them into the scary world of the Pillar of Fire church, the KKK, the eugenics movement, and the Christian fundamentalist eschatology cults of the Great Awakening period. (An eschatology cult is one obsessed with preparing for, and in some cases bringing about, the Apocalypse/Rapture/Judgement Day/whatever. The particular cult they have to deal with is of the "bringing about" sort.) It is also full of wacky Gothic novel business like houses that are kind of alive, summoning and banishing evil spirits, decoding wacky religious texts, digging into the history of decaying aristocratic families to uncover their sordid secrets, disappearing parents, people with multiple identities, a comet that only comes by once every fifty years, a pair of clairvoyant old cat ladies, a repeated creepy song... all that good stuff that is partly cheesy but can also still scare the pants off you, four hundred years after the gothic novel was invented, if done properly. Libba Bray always does it properly, making this book REALLY REALLY FUCKING CREEPY  in addition to being really really fucking funny and cute, which it accomplishes largely with Evie's gin-fueled Wacky Hijinks and a glorious helping of twenties slang. Twenties slang is unendingly awesome. I am planning to use more of it from now on, and am thrilled to have learned a bunch of new terms, like "embalmed" for "drunk" and "jake" for "fine" or "okay."

There are a bunch of serious social-justice-y themes in here, as there always are in Ms Bray's work, although they are not quite as much at the forefront as in Beauty Queens. While the main issues explored are the dangers of tribalism and religious fanaticism, the book also touches on race relations, abortion, sexual abuse and domestic violence, eugenics, economic instability, homelessness, and a bunch of other sociopolitical issues that have changed a bit since the twenties but are still relevant. Libba Bray writes from an unapologetically progressive viewpoint and rarely descends into preachiness, usually following up any Serious Moral Points with plenty of sparkles and stuff blowing up (and, in this book, gin and twenties slang).

I strongly recommend this book to anyone else who likes YA fantasy half as much as I do, and in particular I recommend that you read it quite soon while it is still Halloween season! It is a good Halloween season book. If you are in New York drinking gin, that is even better.