THE STRAIN: A Review

So far, this is the most entertaining book of 2009.
A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold. Everyone is dead, and as the hours pass the bodies do not decompose. What's more, the autopsies reveal that their blood has been completed transformed ... to white. What's more, four of the corpses on the plane revive and are taken to the hospital where ...

No, I can't tell you. That is part of the delicious horror that awaits you. Meanwhile, the non-decomposing autopsied bodies disappear from the city morgue and end up wandering the streets of New York, naked, with toe tags dangling.

In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows what is happening. He's seen it before. And he knows the time has finally come, a war is brewing . . . and knows that his collection of antique esoteric weapons will come in handy, if he can convince someone - anyone! - the truth about what is happening. The most esoteric item in Abraham's collection is the human heart the old man has kept in a jar since the 1960s. And it's still beating.

Across town, Vasiliy Fet, a tough New York City pest control expert, is puzzled by the millions of rats that are fleeing Manhattan. Fet knows rats flee their domain only when the habitat is taken over by another, more vicious vermin. So he descends into underworld of the New York subway system where a bewildering horror awaits.

So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian, Fet and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city--a city that includes his wife and son--before it is too late.
This is part one of a trilogy, volumes two and three are being published in 2010 and 2011. It is an heady mixture of part I Am Legend, part Salem's Lot, part Outbreak, part Blade. The authors are an odd team. Academy Award winning director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Mimic, Blade II and Hellboy) and award winning mystery novelist, Chuck Hogan have written a medical/sci-fi/ horror thriller of epic proportions.

Fast-paced, filled with quirky characters, and moments of sublime horror, this is a must read! Folks, we are talking about an instant classic.

BIBLIO SAYS: Highly recommended!!
Companion Read: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.