No Strain, No Gain

Categories: Staff Picks , Horror & Supernatural , Fiction

 Tighten your toe tags, there’s a new breed of zombie in town.  Pan’s Labyrinth creator slash (pun intended) Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro and Hammett Award winning Prince of Thieves author Chuck Hogan collaborate to invent a voracious vampire-zombie hybrid like nothing else in The Strain. 

The book begins innocently enough with a call to the tower from a 777 aircraft requesting clearance for landing.  The 200 passenger aircraft lands smoothly, she taxies down the runway and she stops dead in the middle of the tarmac.   There’s no activity aboard the aircraft and no one answers the frantic radio calls.  Manhattan has no idea what’s on that aircraft or what’s its in for.  

 

Center for Disease Control specialist Ephraim Goodweather is called out of his precious time with his son Zack to investigate.  What Ephraim and his team find can only be described as the stuff of every nightmare.

 

 I’d like to devote this blog entry to the guy who haunted some of us as children.  He knows who he is.  He has charred skin, eyes of vibrant maize and a jagged sweaty grimace.  He lurks in the closet, the basement and under the bed.   As time passed, he faded away.  Del Toro and Hogan resurrected him with a mad vengeance.  My closet door is locked and all of my lights are on.  The Strain is the first in a trilogy with the second installment, The Fall due 2010 and the third, The Night Eternal due 2011.