Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Fall

Vampires haven’t had a very good decade. Not naming names or anything, but Stephenie Meyer is completely to blame. I’m a 40-something heterosexual male, so right there that tells you a lot about me, I’m sure. First of all, I’m nowhere near the intended demographic for Meyer’s ridiculously popular Young Adult series of books about teen vampires and the vapid emo-girls who love them, Twilight. Second of all, (based on the market research, anyway) I shouldn’t be reading much of anything, let alone Young Adult series about teen vampires and the vapid emo-girls who love them, but I did, actually, read them. Well, the first two books anyway. There are, I think, four books in the series. Reading the first two was actually an accomplishment.

Meyer single-handedly took the bite out of vampires. She literally removed their fangs and somehow gave them the ability to sparkle like unicorns. I won’t even get into what she did to my second-favorite monster, werewolves. Suffice it to say, werewolves aren’t supposed to be cuddly.

Maybe I’m being totally unfair to Meyer (who, despite my utter disgust of the “Twilight” books, is NOT the worst writer in the world; that title still belongs to James Patterson), but Meyer’s girl-ification and castration of vampires has dealt a major blow to the whole vampire genre, one from which the genre is still reeling. Zombies have basically filled the void for truly creepy-as-hell monsters that vampires once proudly filled. Hell, even Anne Rice’s famously effeminate and pre-emo Goth poster boy and Cure fan, Lestat, was still ten times creepier than anything Meyer wrote about.

Thankfully, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan are attempting to re-invigorate the genre with their sci-fi/horror trilogy The Strain, a series that gleefully harkens back to classic vampire novels such as Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend” and Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”, while also paying homage to sci-fi classics such as Michael Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain” and John Carpenter’s 1982 film “The Thing”.

The vampires in Del Toro/Hogan’s books aren’t the glamorous and beautiful Eastern European counts in dark suits that seduce young women. They aren’t sexy. They barely look human, bleed milky-white “blood” that is infested with squirming maggot-like parasites, and shoot six-foot-long tentacles out of their mouths with stingers on the end that latches on to victims’ faces, which simultaneously exsanguinates and then infects them with the afore-mentioned parasites that alters the biological make-up and transforms them into more vampires.

These books are the anti-”Twilight”.

The first book, “The Strain”, started strong and introduced readers to an ensemble of fascinating characters. It also set the stage for the city-wide pandemic that has made Manhattan a battleground and threatens to spread outward quickly, state to state and potentially globally.

In the second book, “The Fall”, the vampire “virus” has spread around the world, thanks to the ease of air travel and the lack of any governmental action. Much of this is due to social media and the Internet, which spreads as much misinformation and “fake news” as it does helpful information. This leads to a skeptical general public, one that already mistrusts its governments.

Another problem is that Eldritch Palmer, one of the world’s super-rich, through his global multinational corporation, the Stoneheart Group (a not-so-thinly-veiled allusion to Koch Industries), is spearheading the virus and the inevitable destruction of humanity simply because he wants to live forever. Palmer, motivated solely by compassionless self-interest, has made a deal with an ancient legendary creature called The Master. In exchange for Palmer’s immortality, the Master will be “allowed” to unleash his vampiric virus upon the world.

Unfortunately for Palmer, there are far greater forces than money that rule the world, ancient and indifferent to deal-making.

Meanwhile, the old Jewish vampire hunter, Abraham Setrakian, is hell-bent on destroying the Master for killing his wife. Answers may be found in an ancient text, older than the Bible, about the first vampires (which may either be extraterrestrial or supernatural in nature; it is alluded that the first vampires may have been fallen angels from the original war in heaven). The book, which was only a legend until Setrakian discovered proof of its existence when he was a young man, has eluded his grasp for decades, until now.

Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, a CDC virologist and fugitive from the law, has been recruited into Setrakian’s vampire-hunting entourage. He is not dealing well with the loss of his ex-wife to the vampire virus, as he has taken to drinking heavily again, which may have unfortunate ramifications for his young son, Zach, whom he is trying to protect.

Unbeknownst to all of them, an underground war is brewing between a conglomerate of several other tribes of vampires around the world and the Master. The other tribes, who feed on humans sparingly, know that to unleash vampirism on a global scale would upset the fine balance that they have established for centuries and millenia. Humans are, after all, their main food source, so it would be counterintuitive to wage a campaign to turn as many humans into vampires as possible, which is what the Master seems to be doing.

While still entertaining and full of great vampiric scares, “The Fall” kind of suffers from the second-book syndrome of a trilogy: it is essentially a “bridge” book between the first book and the third. While some exciting stuff happens, it lacks the intensity and narrative completeness of “The Strain” and acts as more of a set-up for the inevitably large climactic showdown in the third book.

That said, it’s a hundred times better than “Twilight”...