Legends of vampires have been around, as best we can tell, for about as long as humanity has been telling stories. Prior to when Stoker brought them into the mainstream, however, the legends were wild and varied. Dracula carved out for them a static form in the imaginations of people which has more or less become the standard template for vampires as we know them.
Over the intervening years, vampires have been approached from more angles than you can shake a stake at, but generally, these days, fall into one of two schools. The first, the more classical approach that mirrors Stoker’s, is of the tormented monster. Every vampire in the mainstream, from Anne Rice’s seminal Lestat to Meyer’s Edward Cullen, had been more or less an homage to his Count, representing a dark eroticism while, at the same time, attempting with greater or lesser degrees of success to maintain the monstrous nature of their existence.
The second approach, and one which isn’t seen nearly as often because, quite honestly, it isn’t nearly as appealing to the masses as the first, is the alien vampire, the one so dissociated from its humanity as to have become something wholly different. There are only a handful of these examples out there and I’m having some real trouble coming up with any that have had achieved mass recognition beyond fans of the genre, like myself. The Strain, by horror masters Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, is one of those that very well may.
Written as the first book in a trilogy, the final having recently been released, the authors tackle vampirism from an angle that at once both makes it very different and somehow much more plausible than the idea of a damned soul or demonic possession. In the universe they’ve created, post-9/11 New York is set upon by something much more sinister and horrifying than a Victorian count. It’s attacked by a virus.
While I won’t go into detail, as it would ruin some of the more interesting twists in the novel, the vampirism isn’t a curse so much as a sort of sentient disease and the authors play upon some of the more terrifying recent discoveries we’ve made about viruses, such as their ability to replicate by basically re-writing our DNA. While I’m sure they’re taking some liberties that would make some in the bio-medical field cringe, it’s close enough to reality to make it all the more unpleasant.
The book begins with a nightmare scenario. A plane lands at JFK then goes completely dark, just sitting on the tarmac, no response from passengers or crew. The tension-building in this first section is incredible, playing on Freud’s notion of the uncanny, when things about reality are just enough off from what we expect that it unnerves us. What they finally do find on the plane is even more so.
Perhaps because the suspense of the first section was so well-crafted, the second seems to drag a bit, getting somewhat bogged down in the procedural as the action follows the CDC team and other government officials as they slowly uncover the unbelievable truth behind what’s going on. I urge you to push through, though, as it ramps right back up soon enough as the nightmare of the infection truly sets in.
Overall, I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. I enjoy a new take on an old story and this satisfies that. I feel like it may be able to re-introduce the idea of the vampire as monster to a generation of readers that seem to see them more as the bad boys of fiction than the villains. That isn’t to say there isn’t some merit in some of that, as I’m as much of a Whedon fan as the next guy, but it almost felt, to the child in me, as though we lost one of the great nightmares to teenage (and grown-up) fantasy. Del Toro and Hogan have, in the eyes of that kid who thinks we all need reasons to fear the dark, rather than embrace it, gone a long way toward setting things right.
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