Tomorrow I’ll reflect on the final film in my mini monster movie marathon, and today I’ll report on the pair of books that snuck in under the thematic wire in the past month. First up, The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The best thing I can say about The Night Eternal is that it is the final installment of a trilogy, and does not cheat its own finality in order to set up a surprise fourth volume or secondary trilogy or anything like that. Thus, I can happily cross off one of the many series on my ongoing list. Other than that, I found the finale somewhat underwhelming.
The whole saga, which I believe is referred to as The Strain Trilogy after the title of the opening novel, might in fact be misnamed. It all starts out pretty promisingly as a seemingly rational scientific exploration of what a vampire plague might look like, and appropriately enough its main protagonists include doctors who work for the CDC and a New York exterminator familiar with bottom-feeder behaviors and countermeasures. It’s an original take on vampires that drills down through the mythology to some nuts and bolts biomechanics, the most noteworthy of which is probably the idea that a human who is turned into a vampire is actually infected with a parasitic organism which causes them to grow new organs, like the stinger located in the throat, which can shoot out of a vampire’s mouth and attach with two barbs to a victim’s neck and then siphon blood directly. (Kind of a neat way to explain the traditional pair of puncture wounds on a victim’s neck, while making the blood-drinking more efficient. Also creepy as hell.) And there are other touches, too, blood-borne pathogens and distinct chemical properties of silver making it inimical to the parasites, and so on. For a modern vampire yarn, pitting epidemiology against a nightmare with organic origins, it’s strong stuff.
And then the second volume raises the stakes by having the vampire plague spread so quickly that the survivors of humanity have no real way of turning back the tide. And more significantly, the vampires are largely feral if not mindless killing machines, except for The Master, who has evil plans beyond wantonly feasting on the living. Through some insane turns of events, The Master makes alliances with opportunistic humans that end with governments destroyed form the inside out and a nuclear war started amid the death throes of human civilization. The resulting nuclear winter blocks out the sun, which makes Earth more hospitable for vampires round the clock, and also creates such power-vacuum chaos that The Master can impose his will on the remnants of humanity, most of whom meekly submit to life as food source, kept in camps like livestock, knowing they will eventually be slaughtered for their blood but at least given three meals a day and a roof over the heads until then. Grim!
So the end of the trilogy focuses, as it must, on the last few human resistance fighters. The world’s a mess and the vampires are in charge, but there’s still hope that the scorched earth and dark skies can all be coaxed back to the way they were, if the vampires can be eliminated. And luckily, if The Master can be killed – and he can be killed, if the plot of earth he originally crawled out of can be cauterized somehow – then all of the vampires across the globe, all of whom descend from him, will sympathetically drop dead as well. And that … doesn’t really make any biological sense at all. This, really, was my disappointment with the third novel: it abandons any and all pretense of thought-experiment centered on how vampires could survive and thrive as parasitic organisms within our ecosystem, and dives into the waiting arms of fantasy mysticism. I hasten to reaffirm that I have nothing against fantasy and mysticism in my entertainments. But it does feel a bit like bait and switch to go from hematophagic worms and parasitoid anatomical modifications over to inventing a third archangel visiting Sodom and Gomorrah, murdering a fellow angel, being sundered alive by God and then those ragged pieces of seraphic corpse giving rise to vampires.
I’m also perpetually leery of any story that uses a nuclear blast (even a teensy-weensy contained one) as the solution which allows the good guys to triumph. I guess I just grew up indoctrinated to think that nukes are really, really bad and that we don’t know exactly how bad the fallout (in all senses) would be if one were detonated in a bad guy’s lair. So even without the bait and switch, a story about how all the vampires will magically die if The Master is killed, and how The Master will magically become vulnerable if the good guys can set off a nuke atop his primordial resting place (which of course, no cliché unturned, ultimately has to be done by hand by one of our exhausted but still nobly self-sacrificing heroes), would feel like it ended with a pyrrhic victory. So it’s almost like del Toro and Hogan knew that kind of ending was problematic, so they reverse engineered the middle of the story to make it seem not that bad at all in retrospect, considering that whole nuclear-war-laying-waste-to-the-biosphere preceding it and all.
Given del Toro’s Hollywood connections, I’m positive the Strain trilogy will be filmed someday. And I might even check the first one out, but it will have to be pretty amazing to keep me coming back for what I know will be a fatally flawed unsatisfying ending.
Moving on, from one spin on fallen angels to another, Heroes in Hell is an anthology of short stories and, thusly almost by default, is a bit of a mixed bag. As I mentioned when I brought it up on Saturday, it focuses on historical figures in the afterlife, and makes no bones about the fact that this afterlife is one of eternal pain and suffering, presided over by Satan himself. I mentioned that the various players on the infernal stage were vying for control of Hell, but more specifically they are all looking for a way out of Hell (which I suppose might be the only kind of power that matters in the context). It’s not exactly horror, despite the whole devils and demons and death angle. In fact, the tone varies wildly from story to story, some more comedic (Marilyn Monroe is Satan’s inept personal secretary! Napoleon and Wellington have to co-exist as neighbors!) and some more contemplative (Che Guevara ruminating on betrayal and revenge) and some approximating horror-infused urban fantasy (a Nazi and a pagan chieftain dodging skeletal liches while essentially doing a buddy-cop missing persons investigation). Needless to say, by the end of the collection no one has found this legendary escape. But that’s not the end of the story, necessarily, as Heroes in Hell kicks off a whole megastory spread out over a dozen or so books, some further anthologies and some full-length novels.
Do please note that no sooner do I cross the Strain trilogy off my open series list than the _____ in Hell series comes along to take its place. But I am a bit undecided as to whether or not the megastory will stay on the list. On the one hand it’s fascinating to see multiple authors doing their takes on the same source material and high concept; I’m easily impressed by ambitious undertakings, and maintaining coherence with this many contributors is pretty daunting (not that I have found any guarantees that said coherence does in fact prevail). On the other hand, Heroes in Hell didn’t really grab me and didn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger. If there had been a last-act surprise that genuinely changed the dynamics of Hell, implying that subsequent volumes could have real stakes with fortunes rising and falling (thinking here of the game of Thrones model, obviously), that would be one thing. But the only recurring theme was that all of the dead were trapped in a cyclical punitive afterlife with no hope of escape, and I don’t really feel compelled to witness that theme beaten into the ground for four thousand pages. Completism is a hard obsession to ignore, though. And part of me thinks it might not be fair to prejudge the series until I’ve at least given one anthology and one full-length novel a shot. Conveniently, the first novel in the megastory, The Gates of Hell, is the second book in the series, so I can move forward one volume and also appease my own mental mandate for fairness. Maybe I will do that. Maybe not! If ever the question is definitively answered, it will of course get an airing hereabouts.
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