Amazon Best of the Month: Who better to reinvent the vampire genre than Guillermo Del Toro, the genius behind Pan's Labyrinth, and Chuck Hogan, master of character-driven thrillers like Prince of Thieves? The first of a trilogy, The Strain is everything you want from a horror novel -- dark, bloody, and packed full of mayhem and mythology. But, be forewarned, these are not like any vampires you've met before -- they're not sexy or star-crossed or "vegetarians" -- they are hungry, they are connected, and they are multiplying. The vampire virus marches its way across New York, and all that stands between us and a grotesque end are a couple of scientists, an old man with a decades-old vendetta, and a young boy. This first installment moves fast and sets up the major players, counting down to the beginning of the end. Great summer reading.
About Pan's Labyrinth, Anthony Lane concluded: It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.
Have you returned yet? See also, by Mark Z. Danielewski: Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves.
The Strain, by Guillermo Del Toro |
