Following review is from my blog: fromtheunderworld.blogspot.com/2011/10/strain.html

The Strain is the first novel in a trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Del Toro is a much loved director and film writer by horror fans, despite the fact little of his work beyond Mimic can be directly classified as horror. It does however, regularly draw on ideas and imagery from the genre, to fantastic effect. The Strain marks his first foray into prose. Hogan is not an author who's work I'm familiar with, but is best known for his novel Prince of Thieves, upon which the film The Town was based and - as is regularly pointed out by his PR folk - chosen as one of 2005s best novels by Stephen King.

One thing I always wonder when met with a co-authored novel is how the workload was shared, and in a situation such as this, with a celebrity (of sorts) working with an existing author, it's tempting to assume that the bulk of the writing was done by Hogan. Tempting, but probably unfair.

The novel is a vampiric one, dealing with the outbreak of a vampire plague in New York. It uses many of the traditional vampiric traits, abandons others and reinterprets a couple, mostly with the apparent goal of making the creature appear more believable, more scientific. It works, managing to make the whole thing more distressing by rooting it more thoroughly in the modern world. These are still vampires: hurt by daylight, by silver, needing blood to survive. But gone are the religious links and in is an explanation and thoroughly creepy description of the virus, the way it hijacks the human body to its own ends. Dealing with vampirism as a plague, the book is in most ways more similar to zombie novels than traditional vampire-based ones. In this way it taps into both the recent fads in horror literature, but won't quite sit easy in either.

The duo's writing style is mostly top notch, and flows well. I've heard complaints from some that the novel moves too slowly, but the writing is absorbed into your brain with such ease I find such comments hard to agree with. The main place their writing falls down is in two places, and these are my main complaints about the book.

Firstly, they have a habit of dropping out of the narrative to explain a point, whether it's the purpose of a surgical instrument, the meaning of a word or a piece of science. The story is stopped, a lesson given, and the story resumed, where perhaps a more skilful writer would convey their point without breaking pace. Secondly comes the authors' propensity to heavy handedly explain their allegories and euphemisms, often with the effect of painful to read prose that screams of "You see what we did there?". These two combined can create at times the feeling that the pair are talking down to you a little, that they don't carry much faith in their reader's intelligence.

Despite these flaws, del Toro and Hogan manage to spin a yarn that's engaging, fast-paced and hugely enjoyable. Whilst including little of del Toro's signature style and originality, the book is easy to recommend to anyone after a modern, interesting and absorbing take on vampirism. It's simply not likely to make the same impact on literature as his films make on cinema.