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Well, if you're idea of fun includes vampires, biological horror, scary folk tales, and the undead walking the earth, then I have a recommendation for you:

THE STRAIN - book one of the trilogy of novels from Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

If you're a big GDT fan then you are getting some classic, old school Guillermo here. This is his triumphant return to horror in a whole new medium.

The end result?

BLADE 2 meets CSI.

THE STRAIN is not a meditation like PAN'S LABYRINTH, or a metaphorical folk tale like THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE. It is an in-your-face horror thriller that is not for the squeamish.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this book. It is very well written and honestly, I couldn't put it down. For my money, nothing holds my interest like a vampire plague, and this book has some cool new twists to the vampire mythology.

The premise of a vampire "infecting" its victims with a virus is not completely new: I've seen the idea before. What THE STRAIN does well is explore the infection of the unfortunate victim in great detail. The main character of THE STRAIN is Ephraim Goodweather, epidemiologist for the Center of Disease Control. His investigation as to the nature of this sudden and mysterious plague requires understanding the nature and effects of the virus itself.

In other words, the entire book is like playing in GDT's sandbox of the scientifically weird and grotesque. It is a medical journal for Guillermo's vision of the ultimate vampire.

Talk about Gross Anatomy.

But let's not forget Mr. Hogan's contributions. A master mystery writer (PRINCE OF THIEVES), Hogan's sense of pacing and suspense compliments Guillermo's sense of fantasy and horror perfectly - although from what Guillermo has said, it appears Chuck has a prolific eye for the macabre as well. He had never written a horror novel until now, but you would never know it.

In addition to Ephraim, there is a large cast of characters to this story, ranging from the heroic to the evil to the infected. Particularly ingenious is the character of Vasiliy Fet, a tough pest control expert that lends his expertise to Eph. It turns out that rats aren't all that different from vampires - and Fet uses that to his advantage.

Another strong character is the enigmatic Abraham Setrakian. A former professor, and current pawnbroker - his ties to the vampire threat not only go back to the WWII Holocaust Death Camps, but also to his childhood. He may be the best chance mankind has of surviving - too bad he's on heart medication.

I won't spoil anything about the vampires for you - that's the best part of the book - but I will say that they bare a striking similarity to the Reapers in BLADE 2. I know Guillermo said that he wasn't able to fully realize the Reapers the way he wanted to in that film, so perhaps this is finally his perfect vision of a vampire: grotesque, horrible, thirsty and a perfect evolutionary predator.

The wonderful part about THE STRAIN is that the novel is the perfect medium for bringing GDT's vampires to life. You understand them inside and out (literally), but also you'll get uncomfortable access to the thoughts and fears of those who are infected...or are being infected.

And that's stuff you'll never get from a movie, so consider it the ultimate bonus feature.

"The Strain" starts off with a nice hook that pulls you into the story quickly. Unfortunately, it soon bogs down into a pretty standard mishmash of horror/crisis story cliches, including the main character with the failed marriage (cuz he's just so damn dedicated to his job), incompetent bureaucrats, etc., etc., etc.

As far as reinventing the vampire genre, as the jacket blurbs claim it does, not so much. They give a virus/parasite (it's a little confusing as to which, actually, since the characters refer to a virus but there are also visible "blood worms" swimming in the blood of the infected, which seems more like a parasite)as the cause, which is different than the traditional vampire, but certainly has been done before. Probably the most interesting plot development, which is that there are factions within the vampire ranks with differing views about how to interact with humanity, is barely dealt with (probably to be explored in future volumes), but at any rate is certainly not new.

I don't mind tinkering with the vampire mythology (especially since there are a number of myths anyway, so there are always some ground rules to set in a vampire story), but "The Strain" seems to have some consistency issues. For example, vampirism has a biological cause, but the infected are unable to cross running water without assistance from living humans. Why? The sleeping in earth myth is attributed to a sort of nesting instinct that the vampires have, rather than to a true need...however, the Master carts a giant coffinful of Romanian soil around the globe with him and takes some risks to recover the coffin when it's threatened (also, one of the human characters refers to needing to purify the earth so the Master can't use the coffin anymore). Since other vampires in the story seem to function just fine without access to dirt, this seems like a lot of trouble to go to for what is essentially comfort. The infected look normal in the early stages, but can be detected by looking at their reflection in a mirror (but only if it is silver-backed, because silver "always reveals the truth")...why is that again? If it's a virus?

But probably the worst parts of the book, for me, were the parts that just seemed kinda cheezy. For example, a WWII concentration camp survivor (presumably at least in his 80's, since he was an adult in Treblinka) running around decapitating vampires with a single stroke of his silver rapier. Did I mention that he has a heart condition and at one point had every bone in both hands crushed by a vampire? Seems pretty spry, don't he? Not to mention the whole, "my sword sings of silver" battlecry.

I also thought the CDC doctors made the leap from "this virus/parasite is changing people into monsters" to "therefore we must bloodthirstily exterminate the infected" a little too quickly, without even a brief side trip to "is there some way to confine these people and try to develop a treatment?" I could maybe see jumping over that if the main characters were military or law enforcement, but doctors? Doctors usually want to try to treat diseases.

Finally, the story feels like it is being padded out to make it a trilogy when it doesn't need to be. Everything covered in the first volume could have easily been compressed into 100 pages or so without losing anything essential (or even particularly interesting).

- Setrakian (about to face off against the Big Bad): "We split up."
- Fet: "Are you kidding? Never split up. That's the first rule. I've seen too many movies to ever go out that way."

I dig the horror genre so much, but I can't deny that there's a lot of trashy stuff out there. Vampires, in particular, have been featured so often in literature that, in my brain, these books have begun to bleed together. It's hard to meet the standards set by Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, P.N. Elrod, and Brian Lumley. Nowadays it takes an exceptional vampire novel to knock me out of my state of Yeah, whatever-ness. Then along comes filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, obviously evilly bent on conquering all forms of entertainment media and now branching out into horror literature. He and his collaborator, award-winning author Chuck Hogan, have brought it with THE STRAIN, brought the chills, that sense of "Oh, crippitycrap!" and the big-time storytelling. THE STRAIN is the first of three novels, and it grabs the readers by the nape and drags them to some really dark, creepy corners.

It starts with a just landed Boeing 777 taxi-ing on the JFK tarmac but then abruptly coming to a stop. Sensors in JFK's control tower indicate that the airplane, Flight 753, has incurred gross mechanical failure. The window shades on the plane have all been pulled down. And closer inspection reveals that the onboard crew and passengers are dead. Epidemiologist Ephraim (Eph) Goodweather, head of a rapid-response team for the CDC in New York, is called in to determine the presence of a biological threat. What he and his Canary team stumble upon is incomprehensible and very disturbing. Corpses which refuse to decompose, weird biological residue splattered all over the airplane cabin, an enormous black earth-filled cabinet which mysteriously vanishes... and four survivors, diagnosed and then, against Goodweather's wishes, unleashed into Manhattan. That is how it starts, how the plague of the Strigoi - the Old World name for vampire - comes to consume New York.

THE STRAIN spins a shivery, old-fashioned, post-apocalyptic horror story, one that should keep you up well into the night. Even as Manhattan goes to hell, as the undead rise and take a bite out of the Big Apple, I can't help but be stoked. I know that this is only the start of an amazing epic trilogy, and by the trilogy's end del Toro has promised to "rephrase vampirism in a completely fresh way." (I'm not entirely sure what that means, but, dammit, I'm on board!) There's a sense of dread and foreshadowing from the very start, and the authors do well with building up the tension. There's an unsettling passage early on centering around a predicted solar eclipse, this event coinciding with the horrific doings in Flight 753. The best of books allows for character growth and the development of personal story arcs, and del Toro and Hogan know this. The book's emotional core revolves around Eph's relationship with his 11-year-old son Zach, and these two are in for some harrowing, heartbreaking times.

Another key character is the old professor Abraham Setrakian, whose Spanish Harlem pawnshop stores a secret arsenal prepared against the Strigoi (the prof actually introduces this term). Setrakian is an interesting cat, wise and brandishing a silver sword and wielding a battle cry: "My sword sings of silver!" (which is very cool). He's just a bit crazy, a mangled survivor of the Holocaust and harboring his own share of secrets. There are flashback chapters dedicated to his time as a prisoner in a German extermination camp and his first face-to-face confrontation with supernatural evil. For decades Setrakian has pursued this nightmarish thing, and now the day he's been dreading and waiting for has come. I like this old vampire slayer so much that I don't even mind that he smacks a bit of Prof. Van Helsing.

My favorite character, though, is Vasiliy Fet, the big pest control exterminator. Read the book and see what I mean.

I don't know how the workload was parceled out, how much of it from del Toro and how much of it, Chuck Hogan. Part of why del Toro chose to collaborate with Hogan is brought to light in del Toro's interview with Wired magazine: "I'm not good at forensic novels. I'm not good at HazMat language and that CSI-style precision. When [Bram] Stoker wrote Dracula, it was very modern, a CSI sort of novel. I wanted to give THE STRAIN a procedural feel, where everything seems real." We all know del Toro's feverish imagination and his credentials, his directing of Cronos and Blade II (New Line Platinum Series) (there's that vampire connection), and Pan's Labyrinth. But fewer people might be aware that Chuck Hogan wrote the very good The Blood Artists: A Novel, which tells of another out-of-control epidemic, albeit a more conventional one. Hogan is credited with injecting the medical/scientific content, which adds another layer of realism. Much of the story is chronicled from Eph and his colleagues' perspectives, so this horror book does have that procedural feel to it - so, mission accomplished, for del Toro. It makes for a fascinating read, how these doctors and scientists break down the vampire genus in technical terms. This, however, doesn't take away from the atmospheric tone, the creeping horror and the occasional moments of the grotesque. The Strigoi have been around for a very, very long time, and they are everywhere. The following novels in the series will involve an all-out war between the ancient vampires, with humanity as an afterthought. To quote Setrakian: "It will take this thing less than one week to finish off all of Manhattan, and fewer than three months to overtake the country. In six months - the world." Oboy, I can't wait.

SPOILER in this next paragraph.

This being the first of three, I'm not surprised it ends on a troubling note. I'd like to end this in the same spirit, with one nitpick. There is a sequence near the end in which Eph and his tiny ragtag crew of vampire hunters have finally cornered the Big Bad and is about to apply a whuppin' of the permanent sort. What I don't buy into is that in the midst of that, when one in his group suffers an ailment, Eph instantly leaves off putting the finishing touch on the Big Bad to tend to his fallen comrade. The authors obviously mean to illustrate Eph's humanity, but, still, here's the grim apocalypse about to go down, dude, if you don't kill off the Big Bad... I can't remember Spock's famous quote word for word, but it's something about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few...

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2.0 out of 5 stars A Great disappointment
Over all this book did not blow me away , i think i expected so much more from del Toro than what i got. Read more

Published 17 hours ago by E. Bellingan

4.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected
I was in the airport and I saw this book. I quick read the cover and I bought it. I am not a horror lover and I am not a science fiction lover. Read more

Published 2 days ago by Diane Trout-davidson

1.0 out of 5 stars Wait for the movie
The Basics

Something terrible happens to an aeroplane on the tarmac at JFK Airport New York, and it is up to a lone-wolf disease specialist to find out what the hell is... Read more

Published 2 days ago by Angela Meadon

5.0 out of 5 stars Good old-fashioned vampire thrills
This ambitious trilogy has set a new benchmark for vampire, and all post-apocalyptic, novels. This series is epic in proportion and reminiscent of other grand scale mythological... Read more

Published 3 days ago by Randall Neustaedter

1.0 out of 5 stars Vampire B Movie Book
I gave this one star to get your attention and to offset all the 4/5 star ratings which this book absolutely does not deserve. This is a Vampire B movie book. Read more

Published 3 days ago by nomorenicknamesleft

2.0 out of 5 stars I Won't Be Reading the Other Books in the Series
This book was at least compelling enough for me to finish- but just barely. Non-existent character development, chapter after chapter of dull action, plot holes, a silly and... Read more

Published 4 days ago by Alias Crank

4.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing and cinematic horror
Engrossing and unique spin on the vampire/zombie theme. Very effectively combines elements of science, horror, history, and action, told in a clear, effective, cinematic style... Read more

Published 11 days ago by Gary Oppenhuis

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a whole lot of origniality in this piece, but a good read
Combining zombie apocalype lore with cliche vampire romp, Hogan and Del Toro introduce The Strain trilogy. Read more

Published 12 days ago by T. Edmund Jenkin

4.0 out of 5 stars Love-struck "Twilight" vampires need not apply!
THE STRAIN is the first book in an apocalyptic trilogy by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro that chronicles a pandemic vampire disease that has spread its infectious 'strain'... Read more

Published 12 days ago by Film Buff

5.0 out of 5 stars Kept me on the edge.
I'm not big into the vampire or zombie genre but my sister in law suggested this book. I was hooked only a few pages in. You know something bad is about to go down. Read more

Published 22 days ago by Karen

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