It took me more than a few chapters to sink into the Guillermo Del Toro/Chuck Hogan collaboration, The Strain, but there's a method to the way they build the story. It unfolds like a puzzle--an aircraft has gone dark. It has landed on the tarmac without communication, with the shades drawn, with no sign of...life? When it appears that the passengers aboard this flight might all be dead, it's up to Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the CDC, to try to get to the bottom of it.
What he uncovers "spooks" him. But it is just another in a long line of spooky confrontations for Abraham Setrakian, a former professor and Holocaust survivor, who one might think of as being in the "Van Helsing" role.
The seemingly deceased passengers are returning to their "lives" and the handful of survivors are changing. And it seems that the CDC is actually contending with...vampires?
Apparently so. And it seems that the vampire plague is being wreaked on New York because one rich, ailing old man has made a deal with a vampire elder--he is sacrificing all these people for his own desire for eternal life.
What really hooked me was how, although the imagery of the supernatural is used, the actual cause and spread of the "vampirism" is apparently a disease, and the way it is uncovered, the way it spreads, the way it is combated, all seem logical--which actually does make for a creepier presentation. You can convince yourself that there aren't any demons--but you know damn well there are epidemics and plagues. A disease that makes the dead rise and snack on their families is pretty unsettling when plausibly rendered.
The ending of the first book promises a deeper look into who and what the vampires are--it will be hard waiting a year for the next one.
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