Holy apocalypse, these books scared the pants off of me. And not in a cover-my-eyes-and-scream-in-terror kind of way. They were perfect October reading, they definitely got me into the Halloween spirit. These books are so bleak, so dark and creepy, so hard to put down that I found myself coming up for air and breathing with relief that we weren’t really in the middle of a vampire zombie apocalypse.

Yes. A vampire zombie apocalypse. Because that’s basically what the 1st two books in this new trilogy are about. The Strain, to me, was pure, delicious creepiness (if you like that kind of thing). A plane arrives at JFK and stops suddenly on the runway. The CDC is called in to investigate and finds all but 4 of the people on board dead. With no obvious cause of death. As CDC epidemiologists Ephraim Goodweather and Nora Martinez investigate, they discover a deadly and fast-acting new virus. And the 4 survivors are not as well as they seem. Then Abraham Setrakian, an old Holocaust survivor and NYC pawnbroker, sneaks into their lab and tells them to burn all of the bodies immediately, and this begins the (slow) realization by the scientists that vampires are real and a Master has arrived in New York. They join forces with Setrakian and an exterminator named Vasily Fet to fight the vampire virus.

Read more on The Strain and The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan…