By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. William Morrow, 416 pp, $34.99, hardcover

You might wonder why Guillermo del Toro, acclaimed director of dark film fantasies such as Pan's Labyrinth, decided to collaborate on a trilogy of mass-market vampire novels with crime writer Chuck Hogan. But the reality is that del Toro originally pitched The Strain as a long-form drama (like The Wire with fangs) to Fox Television.

Shame on Fox for turning it down. The Strain would have fared better on-screen than it does on paper.

The book's beginning is cinematic: a darkened plane is stranded on the tarmac at JFK during a solar eclipse. The foreboding is palpable. Is this terrorism? Bioterrorism? Infectious disease? It turns out the last option is closest to the truth, as the Boeing's secret cargo (surprise, it's a vampire) is poised to infect all of New York City.

Twilight this is not. In del Toro's vision, vampirism is transmitted by blood parasites, which transform their host into a distinctly unsexy creature with dead eyes, a sickly pallor, and a fleshy stinger that can shoot six feet to penetrate a victim's neck. It's easy to envision what del Toro has in mind if you've seen Blade 2 or Cronos, both of which feature predecessors to The Strain's unsightly breed of bloodsucker.

Unfortunately, the sort of grotesqueries rendered to delightfully revolting effect in del Toro's films just don't provoke the same revulsion when depicted with words, mostly due to a lack of subtlety in Hogan and del Toro's writing. Instead of being allowed to interpret characters' moods and motivations, we're continually instructed as to how they feel (quite frequently, they're filled with horror), and menace is explicitly written into the set and setting. For example, the solar eclipse (technically called an “occultation”, a word that gives all the characters the heebie-jeebies) is “like staring into an eye blinded by a cataract”. And our vampire-fighting hero, Dr. Eph Goodweather, is such a bland caricature that it's hard to imagine he's human.

Heavy-handedness aside, The Strain's plot is tight and fast-paced, making for an easy, entertaining read—exactly the sort of thing you'd pick up at the airport bookstore.