A Book A Week: The Night Eternal (Book 3 of the Strain Trilogy) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Night Eternal (Book 3 of the Strain Trilogy) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, William Morrow 2011 (library copy)

[My comments about The Strain and The Fall]

The Strain (the first book) scared the crap out of me. I still blame del Toro for my inability to go for a jog in the dark. That book had a very visceral sense of place and bodies and blood and corruption. I liked most of the characters and loved a couple of them (I’m looking at you Gus and Setrakian).

The Strain used vampirism as a symbol of terrorism to great (and terrifying) effect. The Fall (Book 2) eased off the gripping fear a bit. It was still scary, but our heroes knew how to fight, knew how to handle themselves, and continued to progress in a strange, new post-apocalyptic world. The focus shifted from short-term survival to long-term survival, with the small hope that something could be done to defeat the vampires. The symbolism developed as well. Nuclear catastrophe is cleverly connected to the spreading monstrosity of the vampire virus. The story still grabbed us where we trembled.

But The Night Eternal? Yes, yes, the humans conquer the bad vampires (oops, spoiler) and love conquers all (sort of). But. I don’t feel any of the things that gripped me from the first books. The story is meh, mish, mash, bleh. The Biblical symbolism, which was applied thickly in the first two books, becomes too literal in this one. Nothing scared me. I couldn’t feel the grit and emotion. The characters are static and empty, phoning in the roles designated to them by the first two books. And I no longer liked any of them. There are fewer main characters, and each of them gets less internal time in this one. The clever alternate perspectives sprinkled throughout the first two books are absent (except for our intrepid Space Station astronaut). Where was the Gus I loved? Where was the Eph who inspired us as an unlikely, smart, scientific hero rather than a self-entitled jerk who just pissed me off? And no, I didn’t buy the portrayal of him as a junkie, no matter what other characters said, and no matter how many baggies of pills rattled in his pocket. The story lacked the details that might have made it feel plausible. The pill baggie lazily stands in as a marker to label him as a junkie, rather than giving us something that more clearly illustrated his descent into addiction and obsession.

On top of that, I kept feeling yanked out of the story by details that felt clumsy. If it’s been two years since the nuclear winter took over, and life in society has settled into a new kind of normal under the thumb of the vampire overlords, will there really still be vicodin in the ransacked stocks of the pharmacies? Will there still be fast food wrappers blowing freely in the streets? I know, I know, it sounds knitpicky, but I felt the yank of disbelief, and it distracted me. That and some artless writing — clunky prose. I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, and I’ll admit that del Toro and Hogan might have painted themselves into a corner, plot-wise, in the previous two books. I could swallow that a lot better if they’d managed to put on a little bit of polish and a few more details that counted. A disappointing conclusion to a trilogy that was scary fun and promising at the beginning.