Morrow, 2009, 401 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-155823-8
Any review of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain can start from an embarrassing number of attention-grabbing hooks: The celebrity stunt-writing aspect; the resurgence of the evil-vampire breed; the post-9/11 New York setting; the first-book-in-a-trilogy angle. They all compete for attention, obscuring the fact that the book reads like an average middle-of-the-road horror novel with techno-thriller overtones.
It would be easy to focus exclusively on Guillermo del Toro, who’s one of the finest genre horror director currently working. Few others combine his rich affection for the fantastic, his storytelling skills and his strong visual imagination. But his obvious influence on The Strain seems limited to two things. First: how the vampires have a striking similarity to the ones in del Toro’s own Blade 2. Second, how his name alone seems to have added 5$ to the book’s cover price for a shoddily-made hardcover. Otherwise, one would assume that the book has been written in more or less the same way as other celebrity collaborations: Ideas and concepts from the celebrity, actual writing from the below-the-line writer. In this case Chuck Hogan, taking a detour in horror after his rather good crime novels Prince of Thieves and others.
The resurgence of the evil vampire as an antagonist is only noteworthy thanks to a blip in popular culture that, from Lestat de Lioncourt to Edward Cullen while passing through a good chunk of the paranormal romance genre, had momentarily de-fanged the vampire in quasi-genre literature. One notes, however, that most of this vampiric denaturation has occurred at the borders of the genre, and not too often within horror itself: The “return of the evil vampire” was never needed for core horror fans. Still, del Toro and Hogan make no secret of what they’re trying to do in this novel: As vampires land in Manhattan, it’s time for a zombie epidemic scenario featuring blood-suckers.
The post-9/11 setting offers a few more interesting opportunities for critical commentary, especially considered within the book’s techno-thriller affections. From the Dracula-inspired opening sequence in which a Boeing 777 lies immobile on the JFK tarmac with only four survivors left inside, The Strain co-opts some of the techno-thriller tricks to heighten its depiction of an initial vampire outbreak. We get short chapters alternating between many narrative viewpoints. We get tons of historical and technical details weaved into the fabric of the story. We even get historical flashbacks explaining back-story, familiar characters, one-off vignettes in which the viewpoint character ends up dying horribly and use of landmark locations in action set-pieces. (Or, as it happens, the use of former landmark locations in action set-pieces.)
It may be familiar, but it works well: The opening sequence is creepy in part because it explains so patiently how official authorities would react to a supernatural mystery. The picture that del Toro and Hogan end up creating of modern New York feels convincing, and does much to distinguish this novel from others in the same pack. The use of thriller plot mechanics also allows the story to tackle a bigger canvas than other horror novels, which is practically a necessity in this avowed first volume of a trilogy that seems headed for global apocalypse.
This potential for scope and breath, however, remains the most distinctive element of a novel that remains overly familiar in its other aspects. If the vampire/zombie hybrids feel as if they stepped out of Blade 2, the human characters also seem to come out of Central Casting: Give me an overworked divorced scientist, a wizened holocaust survivor and a level-headed blue-collar worker! The entire narrative thrust of the novel is just as ordinary, down to the convenient “kill the head of the vampires and the rest will die” plot device. The satisfaction-denied ending is also predictable from the moment we understand that this is the first volume of a trilogy.
The good news are that this first volume does set up a promising follow-up, and that it’s solid enough to please horror fans looking for an uncompromisingly gory take on the vampire genre. The Strain is forthright enough to announce that the two other volumes in the trilogy, The Fall and The Night Eternal, will be forthcoming in June 2010 and 2011. Hopes are that they will take the story in more original territory.
[October 2010: The Fall is a decent follow-up in that it continues the story is pretty much the same way, using pretty much the same characters and monsters. While the apocalyptic atmosphere is stronger, the techno-thriller detailing isn’t as strong. Traditional narrativus interruptus is typical for a second-volume-in-a-trilogy. Recommended for fans of the first book, although it won’t make new converts to the series.]
[January 2024: Oof — it took nearly fourteen years, but I finally made my way to The Night Eternal, third and concluding volume of The Strain trilogy. Never mind why, or how there was time in-between my buying the book and reading it for packing/unpacking my personal library three times and for a complete four-season TV show adaptation (which I haven’t seen) to be announced, produced, released and forgotten. This third volume is actually quite a bit more interesting than I expected — to the point that I seriously thought about reviewing it at length rather than hide it as an appendix to the review of the first volume. But here goes, summarized: The post-apocalyptic setting of this third volume is unbelievable and overdone, but it does take the series to a logical and intriguing conclusion: “What if the vampires got everything they wanted?” It’s a third book that absolutely nails the tone of what a concluding installment should deliver: big payoffs, high drama and a nearly operatic conclusion. Less happily, it transitions from a techno-thriller rationalist perspective to one in which biblical mumbo-jumbo ends up “explaining” everything. At least the book does, once again, make good use of its New York City locations. Amazingly enough, the third act leaves Manhattan and makes its way north, north, north… until it lands in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River — less than two hundred kilometers from where I live. The story itself may be interesting in many ways, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as completely successful: There’s a romantic triangle to resolve, a family unit to disintegrate, old rivalries still burning bright after a two-year time-skip after the end of western civilization, and more contrivances than I care to highlight. The nominal protagonist of the series has become a laughingstock of a junkie in order to set up his redemption arc, while his son is being turned into a vampire in many different ways. As a reviewer getting back into the book-criticism game, I found it all interesting, but I could see how it would divide other readers — especially those who don’t pass by the Thousand Islands one a year. Still, I’d rather have a flawed wild ride than the too-safe approach taken by the first volume. In many ways, I wonder if a fourteen-year break between the second and third book may have worked to the third’s advantage: my expectations were nil except to get the book out of my to-read pile. Now let’s have a look at that TV show…]
[February 2024: Ooh, how interesting. I just watched (sometimes casually) The Strain TV show, and it’s a fascinating case study in adaptation. Adapting a trilogy in a four-season show is not the same process as making a film out of a novel: While the latter means abridgement and concision, del Toro and Hogan had to go the other way in transforming their work into thirty-plus hours of running time: New characters are introduced, subplots expanded, second thoughts executed and entire dramatic arcs changed. Sure, it starts with that immobile 777 on the JFK tarmac — but as the series develops, the differences get wilder and wilder. The overall story scope is often smaller (the infection remains limited to New York City; the climax never leaves the island), there’s a lot of flashback-filler, some plot threads take forever to develop, and the series can never decide whether it’s committing to the vampire-plague apocalypse or not. More significantly, the fates and arcs of some characters are significantly altered in the adaptation. I ended up liking Fet a lot more due to actor Kevin Durand; I ended up liking Eph somewhat less even if he was played by the normally reliable Cliff Stoll. The increasing differences in plot as the series progressed actually kept my interest up — the moment some characters died early on, I couldn’t necessarily predict the specifics of the episode-to-episode plotting. Past the end of the first season, The Strain TV Show is absolutely not a faithful adaptation of the trilogy — which may be for the best… and illustrate just how off-base the third volume is compared to the two first ones.]
