I will admit, I'm a sucker for anything with Guillermo's name on it. After The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labryinth, The Orphanage, and, yes, even Hellboy 1 and 2, this man can do no wrong in my book. He seems to be a tireless source of creative ideas, and quite honestly does this opinion of him justice yet again with The Strain books. I'm still working my way through all of them, so we'll just concentrate on the first book to begin with.
It's a vampire book, yes, one of many amid an influx of the undead that's been injected recently into popular culture, but The Strain sets itself apart through sticking to the older rules of what it means to be a vampire while mixing it with science - it's kind of a modern Dracula.
The story follows a mysterious plane that lands in JFK airport - it simply comes down, sets on the tarmac, and then...nothing. Nothing from the passengers, nothing from the pilots; and so Dr. Ephraim Goodweather and his Canary team (a reference to coal miners, who would use the birds to detect poisonous gases that were otherwise invisible to human senses) to begin the process of figuring out just what happened here. Is it a virus? Some new form of plague? Slowly the truth becomes much, much darker and much less believable in the modern time that would rather shrug off the myths and fears of yesteryear as nothing more than simple minded folk who were making do with what explanations they had.
Sardu, the Dracula of our tale, is one of seven remaining immortals who have created a pact. They are to feed - and these vampires will suck you dry - but once they are done, they must destroy their prey for a new vampire will be born once a human is bit. A rather simple yet elegant solution to what could have easily turned into a massive overpopulation problem. But of course, Sardu is the renegade who believes that he can do what he wants, when he wants, and goes on to detonate a war between the immortals.
The Van Helsing role is filled by Professor Abraham Setrakian (yup, Abraham, couldn't make this any easier for you folks), who was hunted by Sardu as a young boy. What makes his story even more captivating is that he survived a concentration camp during World War II. Sardu could have easily been chalked up to being the twisted nightmares of an old man remembering the horrible days spent in a place that solely existed for the murdering of people. Instead, Sardu is indeed a true vampire, and Setrakian takes it upon himself to rid the earth of the monster. I do wish that more had been made of the parallels between the concentration camp and the vampires, but it's clear that this story was focusing on the turning reality into the supernatural.
The rest of our updated cast for The Strain includes Goodweather as Jonathan Harker, while his divorced wife Kelly takes up the role of Lucy Westenra (which definitely gives away what befalls her). Goodweather's other lady friend, Nora Martinez, could be said to be Mina, the huge Russian rat exterminator Vasiliy Fet is a good stand in for Dr. Steward what with his methodological killing of the vampires (along with his role as something of a son to Setrakian, not unlike the relationship between Van Helsing and Seward), and lastly, to fulfill the role of Quincey Morris, the hotheaded American cowboy, is Augustin Elizalde, a Mexican gangster who goes by the nickname of Gus.
In my mind, the parallels to Dracula are more than just the roles that the characters fulfill - the story itself speaks to the wonders of modern technology and how it can be used to overcome the fears of the past. The new inventions of the telegraph, which allowed people to communicate over vast distances, and the steam engine that gave the ability to transport people over hundreds of miles. These things and more are used to combat and work against the monster, who is trapped in the workings of the past (Dracula favors ships over steam engines, allowing the intrepid heroes to catch up and eventually slay him). In The Strain, ultraviolet lights and silver swords allow for both the protection of the living and the quick dispatching of the undead.
I'm sure these are only a few of the similarities between the two books, but I absolutely love what Hogan and Guillermo have done here. Not only have they given many nods to a classic work of fiction, but they've updated and remade it for modern times in the way that any remake should be done - not word for word (or frame for frame), but instead looked at from a different angle. I'm definitely excited to continue the series and see if the similarities hold up, and that the storytelling remains strong.
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