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A review by kfish3
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan
3.0
The Strain by Chuck Hogan, developed from a story by Guillermo del Toro is a paperback book (after so many Kindle books, I know, I'm aghast!) I had gotten from a $5 paper sack sale at a local library. 'Tis the season for spooky books, I guess.
I had begun reading this book for pleasure between advance reader copies that I've finished and am expecting soon and also because I'm a big fan of the concept that del Toro thinks up (what can I say; being Mexican, I appreciate the art of a fellow Mexican). The story is very much an ensemble piece - a big bad and many minion bads being fought/wrangled in New York by an elder sage professor who had underwent the Holocaust and fought big bads before, a physician with a very similar job to Brad Pitt's character in World War Z, a female physician, and a gritty Russian American vermin exterminator. It's worded very cinematically, but this group of people is consistently and almost nauseatingly marginalized and underminded wherever they go ("Oh, there's NO WAY this crisis will go out of hand," "We just HAVE to arrest you at this most climactic time," "Things cannot go any worse than this," or "We can't possibly believe you when you say that things are going to turn out terribly"), so that, I believe, is its biggest strength and most obvious flaw.
I had begun reading this book for pleasure between advance reader copies that I've finished and am expecting soon and also because I'm a big fan of the concept that del Toro thinks up (what can I say; being Mexican, I appreciate the art of a fellow Mexican). The story is very much an ensemble piece - a big bad and many minion bads being fought/wrangled in New York by an elder sage professor who had underwent the Holocaust and fought big bads before, a physician with a very similar job to Brad Pitt's character in World War Z, a female physician, and a gritty Russian American vermin exterminator. It's worded very cinematically, but this group of people is consistently and almost nauseatingly marginalized and underminded wherever they go ("Oh, there's NO WAY this crisis will go out of hand," "We just HAVE to arrest you at this most climactic time," "Things cannot go any worse than this," or "We can't possibly believe you when you say that things are going to turn out terribly"), so that, I believe, is its biggest strength and most obvious flaw.