On things that go bump in New York
Sep. 22nd, 2012 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileMy 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.
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.
