The Strain
Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
William Morrow, 2009
I had planned on finishing Open Your Eyes first but I mentioned that I had The Strain to a friend and was immediately guilted into reading this first so that I can hand it over. The Strain is the first in a trilogy of novels co-authored by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. While I am both familiar and a fan of del Toro’s work, from the woefully underrated Blade II to the masterful and haunting Pan’s Labyrinth, I am not at all familiar with Mr. Hogan.
The Strain begins with a simple story a grandmother tells her grandson about a vampire. The kind of folksy, cautionary tale whose moral involves eating your vegetables and obeying your elders. From there the story shifts to modern day where a Boeing 777 lands at JFK, then immediately falls silent. As the horror is slowly revealed events slowly spiral out of control as vampirism begins to spread quickly across the city of Manhattan. The Strain is a fairly quick read that at 416 pages manages to maintain a razor’s edge like balance between pacing and atmosphere. Unfortunately it walks that same line between originality and familiarity. Though, on the whole, the balance is definitely in favor of originality.
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