Friday, July 17, 2009
Uncategorized Vampire thriller proves a Strain for del Toro fans
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 1:03 AM
Guillermo del Toro, director of such terrific horror fantasies as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy and The Devil's Backbone, will be in Middle Earth (a.k.a. New Zealand) for several years crafting the two parts of The Hobbit, so his intriguing, weird imagination won't be creeping into cinemas until 2011. Fans can look to another medium for their del Toro fix with The Strain, which del Toro co-wrote with Chuck Hogan. Unfortunately, The Strain proves a disappointing substitute for the work of one of cinema's most gifted fantasists.
The first book of a trilogy, The Strain offers a techno-thriller take on a vampire-hunting tale, as if Clive Cussler tried to transplant Steven King's Salem's Lot to contemporary Manhattan. It begins with a potentially effective episode when a Boeing 777 lands at JFK Airport, then promptly stops dead and shows no sign of life. It's like a 21st century, post-9/11 update of the death ship docking in London in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Unfortunately, undigested research clogs del Toro and Hogan's prose, resulting in passages like this one:
"The LR in Boeing 777-200LR stood for long range, and as a C-market model with a top range exceeding 9,000 nautical miles (nearly 11,000 U.S.) and a fuel capacity of up to 200,000 liters (more than 50,000 gallons), the aircraft had, in addition to the traditional fuel tanks inside the wing bodies, three auxiliary tanks in the rear cargo hold."
Or consider this description of an eclipse -- see if you can figure out the key word here:
"The end was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. Dazzling prominences of light appeared along the western edge of the moon, combining to form a single bead of dazzling sunlight, like a rip in the darkness, giving the effect of a blindingly radiant diamond set upon the moon's silver ring."
After about 100 pages, the persuasive but numbingly-detailed "C.S.I."-style procedures give way to a faster-paced vampire-infection plot that gradually sweeps Manhattan island. The character names can be remarkably corny, such as the hero, the Center for Disease Control's Dr. Ephraim Goodweather; the conspiratorial human bad guy, Eldritch Palmer (an homage to Philip K. Dick); and the ancient, super-powered vampire mostly called The Master (sharing the name with the Big Bad from the first season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). In a particularly weak bit of pop satire, one of the vampire's victims turns out to be a Marilyn Manson-type rock star.
Some of the book's soap opera-level plot twists border on the nonsensical. Despite Palmer's vast resources and The Master's occult powers, they not only frame Goodweather and make him a fugitive, they resort to kidnapping a love done to hinder his medical investigations. The Strain will be followed by The Fall in 2010 and The Night Eternal in 2011, and perhaps the sequels will explain some of the head vampire's seemingly self-defeating decisions.
The surprising thing about The Strain is that it bears such little resemblance to del Toro's other work. Flashback scenes to the childhood of Abraham Setrakian (the book's equivalent to the vampire hunter Van Helsing) evoke Gothic folklore in a fashion comparable to his films. The infected undergo rapid physiological changes that resemble some of the director's ickiest special effects. It's like hoping for a literary equivalent of Pan's Labyrinth, and getting a novelization of Blade II instead.
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