Book Review: The Strain - a bigger, better vampire novel

Forget anything you may have been led to believe about vampires in fiction recently.

Co-authors Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan have produced an intense and violent novel, The Strain, which portrays vampires as anything but attractive, elegant, romantic or "vegetarian" - never-endingly youthful, wistfully searching for the meaning of eternal life.

The Strain is a vampire novel with a contemporary twist, addressing our collective fears.

Currently, Western civilization is in a vulnerable mood. We're in a constant state of high alert over the next natural disaster (post-Katrina, post-tsunami); the next pandemic; the next terrorist attack. With all our present anxieties making us so touchy, the immediacy of a novel about an epidemic of vampirism is bound to boost its emotional effect.

The book begins with an elderly woman relating a rather spooky giant legend to her young grandson in pre-Second Word War Europe. The novel's fast-moving plot soon develops into a confluence between myth and reality.

Shift to the present, and the panic that erupts when a large passenger jet comes to a stop on the runway at JFK airport. No one disembarks, and there is no communication from the darkened craft. Is it a hijacking, a terrorist attack, a publicity stunt of some kind, what?

An investigation by Ephraim Goodweather of the Center for Disease Control leads to terrifying findings that shake him to the core, and force him to gradually accept what contradicts a lifetime of scientific and medical reasoning.

In The Strain, vampirism is a sickness driven by an outside force. Del Toro and Hogan make us consider how it might spread. What might vampires be like if they did actually exist? What might explain them biologically? And what would "changing" physically entail?

Nothing at all nice or good, as it turns out. These vampires are hideous in the extreme. And if a certain creed of the medical community is "fight the disease, not the victim," then the novel captures the confusion and anguish likely to descend upon medical professionals having to struggle with a new and hideously paranormal reality.

Whether our civilization's struggle against terrorism represents a "winnable war," is a matter of vigorous debate in the real world. Faced with a disease of paranormal origin, would the struggle against denial prevail and allow us to fight the disease? The Strain forces this parallel question, and, in its own context, it's a disturbing one.

The Strain, for all its readability (it's practically impossible to put down), reads somewhat like a screenplay - which it very well may be. It's hard not to predict a film version, and Del Toro is an Oscar-winning director after all.

When (not if) the movie version of The Strain is released, it will likely be in some sort of conjunction with adaptations of "Strain" followup novels The Fall and Eternal Night, expected in 2010 and 2011 and completing the trilogy.

I predict a stir that hasn't been seen since release of the Lord of the Rings series, with which comparisons are inevitable.

But, please, no "Strain"-themed value meals at McDonald's or Burger King. And let there be anybody but Tom Hanks in the role of Ephraim Goodweather.

Those hungry for more on "The Strain" and related works will find the website entertaining. Go to http://www.thestraintrilogy.com for "book trailers" and background.