The Fall

In my brief review of the first book of the Strain Trilogy, [b:The Strain 6065215 The Strain (The Strain, #1) Guillermo Del Toro http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255573295s/6065215.jpg 6241525], I wrote “I thought at first that the story was being stretched too thin, that too many ancillary characters were getting too much screen time, but everything comes together in satisfactory fashion by the end of the book.” The second book of the trilogy, [b:The Fall 6723348 The Fall (The Strain, #2) Guillermo Del Toro http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1277534846s/6723348.jpg 6919505], suffers from the same problem of stretching the story too thin over a number of characters, but unlike The Strain, The Fall isn't able to pull everything together by the end. And as the story expands to include less interesting and more stereotypical characters, the three main characters of the story become less believable and more like cliched action heros. For most of hte novel, they essentially become a trio of Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Jack Bauer type characters–characters who accomplish ridiculous tasks with incredible ease and who can be set upon by packs of ravenous vampires, set off an underground explosion, and then walk away without serious consequences.The Strain certainly wasn't an innovative vampire novel, at least not in comparison to a vampire apocalypse novel like [b:The Passage 6690798 The Passage (The Passage, #1) Justin Cronin http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1289283007s/6690798.jpg 2802546] or a vampire conspiracy novel like [b:Carrion Comfort 11286 Carrion Comfort Dan Simmons http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223649654s/11286.jpg 909623], but The Fall feels like a Tony Scott version of the first book in the trilogy.