Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Strain’ is on book shelves everywhere

I’ve never read a single book that Guillermo del Toro has written (of which there are very few), but this new book called The Strain may change all that.

It’s a vampire book. Nothing new there. But from the reviews I’ve read, the real unique aspect of it may be the “technical nature” in which it’s written. Almost like a Tom Clany novel with vampires?

The book is just volume one of a trilogy, which makes it even more compelling to me.

SciFiWire reviewed it and gave us the opening scene that sets the stage for the story:

The Boeing 777 arrives at JFK but goes dark soon after touching down, and it doesn’t taxi to the arrival gate or respond to worried queries from the tower. A baggage handler is sent to investigate and reports that the window shades in the passenger cabin are all down, the lights in the cockpit off.

Nobody reports, or at least puts on the record, the sense of something profoundly wrong, of evil, emanating from the aircraft. They suspect that (unfortunately) mundane explanation, terrorism. Or, perhaps, a viral outbreak.

But once the emergency workers manage to get inside, where they find a packed plane filled with the corpses of international travelers who seem to have peacefully died in their seats … once a coffin-shaped box lined with dirt is found in the cargo hold … once autopsies reveal the passengers to have been drained of blood … canny readers will be screaming at those authorities for their refusal to recognize the symptoms that became familiar with Dracula.

Read the entire review over on SciFiWire.

For all the vampire fans out there, does this book look interesting to you? I think I’ll pick it up once it hits paperback, but the hefty $26.99 is a bit much. Of course, Amazon has it for $16 + shipping if you are looking to get it online.

I believe I read somewhere that these books will be turned into a movie or TV show, but I’ll need to dig further.