The start of the vampire apocalypse… It’s very well-written, but…
At New York’s JFK Airport an arriving Boeing 777 taxis along a runway and suddenly stops dead. All the blinds have been drawn, all communications channels have mysteriously gone quiet. Dr Ephraim Goodweather – head of a rapid-response team investigating biological threats – boards the darkened plane… and what he finds makes his blood run cold.
Meanwhile, in a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, aged Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian knows that the war he has been dreading his entire life is finally here.
Before the next sundown Eph and Setrakian must undertake the ultimate fight for survival. A terrifying contagion has come to the unsuspecting city – hungry, merciless, lethal… vampiric?
It took me so long to get around to reading this. And it’s taken me a few months to get around to writing the review. I’m not sure why, but there we go. The first in del Toro and Hogan’s trilogy, it chronicles the events that spark the outbreak of a vampiric plague in New York, threatening the country beyond, and the toppling of the status quo. It’s an interesting novel, but one that I struggled with a fair bit, given its pacing. Conceived as a trilogy, this novel is basically the set-up and that’s about it. We learn a little of the background – minor moments from the vampire’s history, and the former-concentration camp inmate who discovered that it was feeding on inmates; and then, decades later, tracking it across to the New World.
