Lengthy vampire tale a bit of a Strain

By Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

William Morrow, 416 pages, $27

THE first 100 pages of this gripping thriller suggest a great modern vampire novel of the calibre of The Historian or Salem's Lot.

Alas, The Strain is 416 pages long, not 100, and it's but the first of a promised trilogy.

It opens as a transatlantic airliner makes a routine landing in New York and taxis towards the terminal. Then it shuts down completely, every system on board simultaneously. Not a word from the crew, not a peep from the passengers' ubiquitous cellphones, no movement, no lights, no sound.

Anti-terrorist squads surround the plane, and when at last our heroes from the Centers for Disease Control go on board, they find everyone seemingly dead, yet with no sign of a struggle, no distress, no gas in the air, no explanation at all.

There's talk of checking the flight data recorder back in the lab, but that's the last that readers hear of that little detail. In fact, while it's sort of implied what happened on the airplane, it's never actually explained.

The authors are Guillermo del Toro, the Spaniard responsible for the brilliant film Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy flicks, and American thriller writer Chuck Hogan.

For that first 100 pages they've laid out an intriguing premise -- vampirism as an actual virus that can infect and control a body after death, pitted against all the knowledge and technology of the Centers for Disease Control.

All the victims have lacerations on their throats, their blood has been replaced by a milky white fluid, and once in the morgue, they don't seem to be showing any signs of rigour mortis or decomposition.

Meanwhile, down in the flight's cargo hold, there's an oblong coffin-like box that's not on the cargo manifest, filled with soil that smells of death and decay.

The Strain soon becomes a gore-filled familiar mixture of pretty much every run-of-the-mill vampire book and film you can imagine.

The authors introduce a handy Dr. Van Helsing character out of the Dracula mythology, an elderly vampire-fighting professor from eastern Europe who knows everything that's happening.

By the second or third night, as the undead passengers revive and rampage through NYC after dark, each feeding on several people in disgusting and gross ways and transforming each victim into a vampire, the war between humans and vampires is on.

Readers might think that such nightly mayhem in the streets of New York would attract attention. Each dawn finds thousands of people having disappeared overnight, cars abandoned, homes and businesses smashed, hordes not showing up for work.

Yet the voracious New York media pay no attention, nor does Homeland Security or the FBI, and no one witnessing all this craziness takes a cellphone photo or posts anything on Facebook or calls the tabloids.

By the time some vampire-hunting vampires show up, straight out of the Blade films, and the CDC survivors and the ancient professor form their own group of Buffy-wannabe slayers, Del Toro and Hogan have lost control completely.

Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 7, 2009 D4