PG's Books

This is the second book in The Strain Trilogy. It is a decent enough horror / apocalypse story but it, unfortunately, gives the feeling that you are reading a TV-show script rather than a genuine book.

The book is the usual roller coaster ride of intrigue, traitors to humanity, surprise attacks and our heroes’ attempts to thwart the bad guys from achieving world domination that you would expect from a TV-show. When reading the first book it felt a bit different and somewhat fresh compared to the usual vampire stuff but with this book I felt that it had lost some of its freshness and instead fallen back to some mixture between The Walking Dead, a modern vampire story and some general government conspiracy/stupidity crap.

There are quite a few flashbacks into the earlier life of professor Setrakian and I have to say that I am generally not too appreciative of lengthy flashbacks. The book follows a few different groups of people who’s destinies (of course) intermingle after a while. I did like the Silver Angel and the bunch of misfits he ended up with.

The book, the entire series actually, is also a bit of a strange mixture between attempts to put a scientific spin on things and, at the same time, some mythological unexplainable magic. For example the vampires are supposed to be the result of a virus or rather some parasitic entities that invade the body but at the same time it includes nonsense, from a scientific point of view at last, such as the inability for the vampires to travel over moving water. The author should have stuck to one or the other.

The book is a decent enough read but it fails to elevate itself above the level of a fairly mediocre TV-show. The concept of a bunch of humans that collaborate with beings that want to reduce the human race to food stock is really a typical example of this. This kind of plot was dumb the first time it was invented and it is still dumb.

I will probably read the next book as well in order to finish the trilogy but I fear it will not be one of my most memorable moments. I think Guillermo Del Toro should stick to making movies and leave the book authoring business to people more adept at it.