The Strain

At night, a passenger plane from Berlin lands smoothly in New York, yet no passengers disembark for a long time. The cabin lights are all off, and no one answers the radio calls. Ephraim Goodweather, an epidemic specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is ordered to lead a team into the cabin in protective suits to investigate, and finds that the great majority of passengers have died peacefully in their seats; the fuselage is intact, and the bodies show no signs of trauma or poisoning. They unexpectedly find four survivors, along with a huge black wooden box shaped like a coffin and filled with earth. Quarantine and autopsy procedures cannot explain what lies before them, and the authorities lean toward treating it as an unknown virus or a mass poisoning incident. Abraham Setrakian, an elderly university professor, recognizes the signs from television news: he knows this is not a disease, but that the ancient "them" have come. To stop the spread, he must persuade Eph to destroy all the bodies and the black box as soon as possible. But the order to seal off the area comes too late, and patients with strange behavior, aversion to light, and craving for blood begin to appear in the city; a dark invasion that uses the modern metropolis as its hunting ground thus unfolds. This work is the first volume of the Strain trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, reconstructing the vampire legend through the methods of medical investigation and cinematic multi-threaded narrative, utterly different from the elegant and romantic image in traditional vampire fiction; it was later adapted by the FX network into a television series of the same name.