Fucking vampires. I’ve about had it up to here with fucking vampires. Because I read them “off season” (see: after I finished my first hundred books), you were spared my thoughts on The Twilight Series. Which basically amount to this: if you cut out all the bullshit twee Romeo and Juliet by way of Wentz and Simpson professions of desperate emo love, you’d have a pretty solid novel. Instead, we’ve got kids wandering around the malls in black eyeliner drinking Clamato juice out of silver goblets they bought at Hot Topic. Worse yet are the adults who are fawning over this tepid repackaged kiddie-porn. I can understand a fucking teen falling for this shit, but really, shame on you. Tell me you read it for the articles.
What the fuck does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Nothing. Only to say this. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan are intent on taking it back. They haven’t, not by a long shot, but they’re goddamn trying. Because the two men have created what amounts to a really well-done Sci-Fi Channel movie about biohazards that turn people into motherfucking real vampires. These cocksuckers sure as shit don’t sparkle in sunlight: they burst into flames as God intended.
A plane touches down on a runway after losing contact with the tower, and everyone save four random folks — a pilot, a rocker, a lawyer, and a computer programmer — are all dead from some mysterious unexplainable malady. The tension of the novel would have worked so much better if — similar ironically to the first Twilight novel — they hadn’t given away that it was a vampire novel. It’s set up like a 28 Days Later, where nobody has any damn idea what’s happened, if the virus is contagious, if it even is a virus, only they pepper it with a combination of old school Dracula type shit (a sinister black coffin) and some really shameful Lifetime melodrama.
The Strain takes it’s time to get into the action, kind of stumbling through the narrative set-up to get to the meaty vampire action. There are a shitton of characters to introduce: from the bioscientist hero to the rat-killing exterminator to the creepy old Eastern European man who portends ill omens when the creatures are unleashed. The characters do feel a little prepackaged, but Del Toro and Hogan give them just enough backstory and depth to raise them above mere cannon fodder or cardboard cutouts. Do I care about these folks? Eh, a little bit. But not really. It’s kind of like Heroes towards the second season. Just as you’re starting to really give a damn, someone else is introduced, and so it’s quite a bit to keep track of. But you quickly figure out who’s gonna stick it out, and who’s not long for this world.
Who you do care about are the vampires. Setting up the mythology of your supernatural is critical to any sort of zombie/vampire novel — even if the story is “we have no idea”. The vampires of the Strain are more like biological oddities, and since we’re dealing with medical professionals, there are plenty of autopsies and scientific data to make it really squishy. Rather than fangs and lack of tan, the vampires essentially develop a cancer that eats the host, turning them into a feeding machine. They develop stinger lashing tongues that shoot out and suck the life out of their victims, infecting them with the virus. They’re susceptible to ultra-violet rays and silver.
Since this is coming to us from one of the forgers of the Blade Trilogy, Del Toro knows what he’s doing. And it’s pretty disgusting and visceral and awesome. It’s a little cheesy and the dialogue gets painful — particularly their insistence on including a subplot involving a painful divorce proceeding and the custody battle. I don’t want people cramming a goddamn Ally McBeal episode into my killfest, you dig? At times, the novel feels a bit like the Jurassic Park sequels, when you want a little more Jurassic Park. There’s nothing going on in the novels that couldn’t have just been as easily set up in script form first. Del Toro’s a talented director, if a bit too overly sentimental for his own good. And since there are two authors, I’m not sure who’s really to blame for which lacks.
I’ll definitely stick with the series, as it’s popcorn fun. And it’s refreshing to remember that you don’t have to be some sort of douchey desperate teenage to be hurt by a vampire you love. It hurts even worse when your family member wants to eat you.
