The Strain
Ratings120
Average rating3.7
This one is a disappointment. There are some cool ideas in here, and a few scary passages, but mostly it's cliche and kinda boring. Wooden characters, heavy-handed plot development. I had been looking forward to this for a while, but I won't be reading the other two books of the trilogy.
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Finished it just to finish it. It reads like an unfinished movie script. Weak!
Watched the show beforehand, and while I don't think I can say the book is better than the show I am so glad I read the book, it adds a lot more to the story in some aspects. And also in general just more details. I may not be the best written but it is a very unique story with a cool monster.
I watched the show and thought the books would fill in some of the gaps.... UGH!!! Eph was so boring!!
Já sabia a maioria das coisas que iriam acontecer pois já tinha visto a série, mas mesmo assim o livro prende, escrita maravilhosa e bem descritiva, te faz ficar apreensivo mesmo
Whoa! I'm so glad I was listening to this, rather than watching it like another title tied to the author; Pan's Labrynth! This is definitely better than the TV series by the same name.
An interesting modern version of the vampyre story, good movement, lots of suspense, a bit confusing during the storyline transitions.
I'll read the 2nd in the series.
A book like this really highlights the limitations of using star systems to rate books (as Goodreads does).
On one hand, this isn't an example of beautifully-written prose. It's exposition heavy, the characters are fairly flat and stereotypical, and the “reimagining” of the vampire myth is given a lot more hype than it really lives up to. It's easy to see why this would be a low-rated book.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Guillermo del Toro has such affection and enthusiasm for vampire stories, pulp fiction, and horror, and it shines through on every page of this book. He manages to take the fairly wooden contents and breathe enough fresh air into them that it the book frequently had me grinning. It's easy to see why this would be a highly-rated book.
If you're a fan of vampire fiction, you should probably check this out. It's too much fun to leave unread.
I got hooked. The TV series does a decent job but the book kept me hooked. Went through the trilogy in a couple of days.
Ron Perlman is a good narrator. He did the best he could. I'll read the rest of the trilogy. TV show is so much better.
I like to think of this book as existing with two halves, the first part and the second part. The first part was phenomenal, and the reason why I rated so highly. The recording at the beginning, the image of a darkened, “dead” plane against the backdrop of an otherwise busy airport... fantastic. The first part yanked me in with a solid constructed mystery - ‘Why did this plane land and promptly go silent?' followed by ‘Why did everyone on board simply drop dead?'...where it then led me to the second part, where I found out this was a vampire novel. I have no issues with vampire novels. [a:Guillermo del Toro 167605 Guillermo del Toro https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244751075p2/167605.jpg] does a fantastic job of illustrating a creature we have otherwise, in recent years, ‘domesticated'. What I did take issue with was the excellent setup and somewhat lame conclusion. As [b:The Strain 6065215 The Strain (The Strain Trilogy, #1) Guillermo del Toro https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1326225354s/6065215.jpg 6241525] progressed, the plotholes and fantasy got larger and more grandiose, leaving all of the beloved science behind that had originally made this story so riveting. Many characters that began as individual people slowly degraded and bled into one voice with no color. The story plunked its way to a off-tune conclusion, no doubt leaving wiggle room for [b:The Fall 11991 The Fall Albert Camus https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388187123s/11991.jpg 3324245]. Based on the reviews written for the sequel [b:The Fall 11991 The Fall Albert Camus https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388187123s/11991.jpg 3324245] and the conclusion [b:The Night Eternal 6945530 The Night Eternal (The Strain Trilogy, #3) Guillermo del Toro https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327932900s/6945530.jpg 6965593], I will pass on these two and leave them be. Not a horrible book by any stretch, but one I also won't revisit.
Je ne vais pas ressortir le cliché du “mythe du vampire revisité”, mais l'approche quasi-scientifique des vampires dans ce premier volume d'une trilogie m'a bien plu. Ca se lit bien, comme le scénario d'un film, et ce n'est pas étonnant quand on sait que c'est co-écrit par le réalisateur Guillermo Del Toro est que le roman a été adapté en série TV récemment.
I know I know another vampire story... Think omega man style vampires though, not the a shiny teen angsty kind. The creatures just started coming to life, so far it is awesome fun to read. Can't put it down!
Edit: great story on completion I hope the series keeps up the momentum!!
Starts with a bang and then proceeds to go nowhere. The characters were all completely and utterly bland–people with money were beyond evil and people without were beyond reproach, and that was about it as far as character development went. I did like the mythology and attempt to lend some scientific credence to vampires. And the plot was enough to keep me interested even if it wasn't particularly memorable.
Let me see if I can do this without giving away spoilers, ie, stick only to the info that's already relayed on the back cover. The writing is bad, it moves along at a nice pace, which is why the novel got the stars it got. My problem with it is I spent the first quarter of the novel thinking I'd heard this story, or something similar to it, before - and I had, in Stephen King's short “The Night Flyer.” The rest of the novel read like a loose modernization of the classic Brahm Stoker, which for a vampire novel isn't unexpected, but still, I'd been hoping for something a little more. You can definitely see Del Toro's influence in the vignettes that are interspersed through the novel, which are very movie-like in their quick glimpses. But there were no major surprises or seat gripping moments, either. Good for a beach read or home sick.
Pretty conventional modern vampire fiction (vampirism is a disease that threatens to destroy humanity, usw.) but very well-paced and enjoyable. The authors do a good job of managing a number of characters and making them all fit into the plot. 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. One thing I didn't like was the way the book tried to explain the biomedical aspects of the vampirism virus. In a book about a Holocaust survivor devoting his life to hunting a centuries old giant vampire with the help of a CDC doctor and a rat exterminator, scientifically realistic descriptions of the biological workings of vampirism aren't really necessary.
Pretty conventional modern vampire fiction (vampirism is a disease that threatens to destroy humanity, usw.) but very well-paced and enjoyable. The authors do a good job of managing a number of characters and making them all fit into the plot. 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. One thing I didn't like was the way the book tried to explain the biomedical aspects of the vampirism virus. In a book about a Holocaust survivor devoting his life to hunting a centuries old giant vampire with the help of a CDC doctor and a rat exterminator, scientifically realistic descriptions of the biological workings of vampirism aren't really necessary.
LOVED this one, wow, what a page turner. Fast paced, well written and suitable creepy. I can't wait for books two and three in the series!
Absolutely loved this book. I'm a big fan of Guillermo's movies and this book did not disappoint. It reads like a movie and I couldn't put it down. I am very excited for the sequel!