The Strain 1: Invasion

A passenger plane from Berlin to New York touches down and then suddenly halts on the runway. All the window shades are drawn, the lights are off, and communications are dead. When ground staff board, they find that most of the passengers and crew have died under bizarre circumstances, along with four survivors—and one enormous black wooden crate shaped like a coffin. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, head of the CDC's Canary Project, is ordered to board and investigate. What he sees makes the epidemiologist, used to facing biological threats, feel a deep chill for the first time. Meanwhile, in an old pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, Holocaust survivor and former professor Abraham Setrakian quietly sifts through his collection of old belongings. He has studied vampire legends for decades; he knows what that black crate means, and he knows the long-awaited war has already begun. Rat-catcher Fet, street kid Gus, and others are drawn in one after another. The novel rewrites the vampire legend through the logic of modern epidemiology—viral infection—using epidemic prevention procedures, pathology reports, and quarantine measures to carry on the old Gothic fear, and threading together the mystery of the vampire invasion's origin with legends Setrakian heard in his Eastern European homeland and memories of the Nazi era. The prose is cool and restrained, the scene-setting highly cinematic. It is the first volume of the trilogy co-written by del Toro and crime novelist Chuck Hogan.