LITERAL REMAINS

A Boeing 777 lands at JFK International Airport and shuts down.  It goes deathly quiet and dark.  The shades are drawn on all the windows and the crew does not respond to air traffic control.  Police arrive and they eventually board the plane to discover the passengers dead.  A special branch of the CDC, the Canary Project, lead by Dr. Eph Goodweather, is called to investigate.  Goodweather and his team discover four survivors, hanging onto life by a prayer.  They also find a large black box, a coffin, in cargo, and ultraviolet light shows something sprayed all over the interior of the plane.

The survivors don’t remember anything, once their health improve, and the matter is more puzzling when the other hundred and some odd bodies go missing from the morgue.  Aged Harlem pawnbroker Abraham Setrakian knows the culprit behind it all.  It’s a creature he has hunted since his days as a prisoner of a Nazi execution camp.  When he confronts Eph, spouting facts about the bodies he shouldn’t know, he is quickly arrested.  After Eph is made suspect and has to work outside the law and the system, he teams with Setrakian to stop the plague of vampirism that is spreading throughout Manhattan.

Written Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain isn’t the innovative, end-all-be-all, vampire novel the world has been awaiting.  It’s a good book, but is hampered with by-the-numbers plotting and cliches, e.g. Eph’s frame up and dismissal from the CDC.  It’s those predictabilities that make The Strain frustrating.  From this first book of a trilogy, I wasn’t terribly impressed, and it doesn’t make waiting for the second book in 2010 unbearable.

The Strain’s vampires are interesting, but not as interesting as the vampires of Del Toro’s films Cronos and Blade II.  The vampirism as virus is good, but Ray Garton did it better with werewolves with his novel Ravenous.  The opening with the airplane is good, and there are some other creepy little scenes scattered throughout.  And there is some interesting bits of info about rats to found.  A lot of this book is similar to Stoker’s Dracula, an obvious comparison, but it’s a credit to the authors that it doesn’t feel like cribbing, but more like respect and honor.  The terrors in the suburbs and side streets give it a small town horror feel in the middle of the big city.

It would probably be better to review the trilogy as a whole.  The Strain is basically just a set up for the next chapter in the series.  A good effort, but not that impressive.

3.5 out of 5
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