Just when I thought the vampire genre had become overrun by vaguely homoerotic, pale skinned man-boys with sunken cheeks and puckered lips along come Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan with their novel, The Strain. There are no forlorn, love-lost, shirtless blood suckers in this one; no sir, the villains in here are pretty nasty. Kind of like Ridley Scott’s Alien crossed with a zombie and a Pez dispenser. Oh yeah, and blood worms.
For the most part the story takes place in modern day New York, but includes some back story on the character, Abraham Setrakian – the story’s Van Helsing – and the tales his grandmother told him of Jusef Sardu, a young nobleman suffering from a rare form of gigantism.
The Sardu family patriarch believes that if Jusef eats the flesh of a wolf – the Sardu family symbol – Josef’s condition will be alleviated. Unfortunately, it doesn’t turn out that way. On the night of the hunt, rather than being the hunters they were the hunted. All of the men, with the exception of Jusef, die horribly. The young giant, with his weakened body, is left to discover and bury the bodies of all of the men in his family. He then sets out to find and kill what did it.
Fast forward to modern day New York. An airplane, a 777, a jumbo jet, I presume, lands under mysterious circumstances and is found on the airport’s taxiway like a giant, slumbering hulk. No motion, no communications, and no internal or external lights – she’s totally dark . . . and dead. The sleek shell, like the boat of the original novel, also contains mysterious cargo.
For the most part, like a vampire’s aversion to light and silver, the novel stays true to some of the conventions that we’ve come to expect. In others, it self-references the genre and declares them to be false. (Damn, crucifixes and holy water don’t work.) In others still we find the authors injecting interesting twists. For example, in previous incarnations, a vampire could only come into our home if it was invited and could only cross a body of water unless helped. This is significant when we’re given the history of these vampires and the delicate truce that they observe between their various ancient groups and the locations that each group occupies.
The Strain is the first of three novels telling this story, and it successfully introduces a number of compelling elements that deliberately provoke the reader by playing on our fears of viral and biological infectious agents. We see that it’s more than a vampire’s bite that can turn you.
Pay extra special attention to the “Thrum . . . Thrum . . . Thrum” of the only thing that sates a vampire’s thirst.
I’ll leave it to you to read the book to see how that turns out.
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