Recently read The Strain, the new vampire novel by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. It’s fast-paced, engaging, and has a hell of a creepy opening sequence. It’s the first horror book that’s actually caused me to feel horror in a long time.
The AV Club, however, makes a good point. These are not your sexy vampires wearing the latest goth fashions:
…whatever the reason, blood-sucking fiends lurking in the shadows no longer carry the same old skin-crawling cultural cachet. Which presents a problem for writers who still want to use them. The modern solution, and the one director Guillermo Del Toro and writer Chuck Hogan opt for in their new novel The Strain, is to drain the archetype of its supernatural trappings. No more moping goths, Christian symbolism, or demonic villainy; now it’s a biological threat that has to be handled with modern technology.
As a result, don’t look for Edward Cullen here. These vamps are a lot more like zombies than Dracula. They even have a (disgusting) biological stinger/tongue that flicks out and paralyzes their prey for draining. (If you’re wondering what it looks like, check out Blade 2, directed by Del Toro — he used the same gimmick there.)
Del Toro and Hogan don’t remove all the mysticism. The head vampire is demonic, telepathic and immortal, resembling Barlow from the 1979 miniseries version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot; vampires still can’t cross water without human help, for some reason; and unlike zombies, the vamps remember their friends and families after they’ve been turned, if for no other reason than they’re looking for a quick snack.
That was my only real reservation about the book — changing the rules mid-game. I think it might have been necessary — otherwise, there would have been nothing to make this different than a zombie book. I suspect, in the later two books, it will come out that the heroes have been fooling themselves, looking for a scientific answer to what is, at root, a demonic problem.
And I’m willing to go along on that ride, to see what happens next.
1 Comment
June 26, 2009 at 1:09 am
This book sounds pretty interesting. I’ve been getting restless with vampire novels as of late (GOD DAMN YOU STEPHANIE MEYERS FOR MAKING THEM FASHIONABLE!!!), so I might just have to check this out. Thanks.