First Impressions: The Strain

When it first arrived as a book back in 2009, I was pretty intrigued, and incredibly lucky.  I actually came across the novel The Strain in my local grocery story while doing my weekly shopping.  Even through I tend to be pretty good about keeping track of the various authors I enjoy reading, sometimes things fall through the cracks and if I hadn't have been interested in the bin of books I probably wouldn't have come across the title for months after the fact.

The original book was pretty great - having read a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, I'm pretty familiar with the tropes, but The Strain almost immediately goes its own way, the story works as a medical thriller, a supernatural thriller, and a monster book all at once, and the entire trilogy (followed by The Fall in 2010 and The Night Eternal in 2011) is well worth the read.

Yesterday, FX premiered the new television series, The Strain, and it was pretty amazing; I watched it with my wife and youngest daughter (aged 17) and the entire story built up a nice level of suspense throughout and then really just went for the jugular.  If you haven't seen it yet, give it a try - the story is intense, but with good casting and a great sense of theatre, I had a a lot of fun watching it.

A quick side note - my daughter, who normally enjoys a lot of horror-themed stories, decided to leave the room ten minutes before the end of the episode as it simply got a little too intense for her (also more than a little graphic), so it may not be fore the faint of heart, or even people who normally enjoy scary movies - I have it admit it definitely got my heart racing.

Looking forward to episode two next week.

Book Review: The Fall

A little over a year ago I reviewed the Guillermo Del Toro / Chuck Hogan novel The Strain. It followed the beginnings of a modern-day vampire apocalypse through the eyes of two doctors, a child, a pest exterminator and a vampire slayer. Last week I finished reading the Sequel, The Fall.

First off - this book was really good, it moved up the pace of the first book and basically follows the first three weeks of the outbreak from the centre, New York City. We are still following the same characters from the first novel and as the set up already occurred in the first novel, the book jumps right into the thrills of the story.

My only issues with the book come from its placement as the second in a trilogy - basically you know everything is going to go bad, because that is how the second story in a trilogy works. Other than that, the novel was a lot of fun and has me definitely looking forward to the last book in the series The Night Eternal.