Waiting on Wednesday

What I'm Reading: Graceling by Kristin Cashore and Many Stones by Carolyn Comen


What I'm Working On: I like distinct landmarks for "starting things". I'm getting new direction on my writing, and hitting it hard on May 1st.





Waiting On: The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date: June 02, 2009

Synopsis:
A heart-stopping thriller-the first in a trilogy-about an invasion of vampires by one of Hollywood's most popular and imaginative storytellers, the creator of the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth.

A Boeing 777 lands at JFK after a flight from Berlin and is on its way to the gate-when it suddenly goes dark. Just stops dead. The control tower loses contact with the pilot and all electrical activity shuts down. No movement or communication from inside. Nada. An emergency crew gathers, everyone watching the silent plane now bathed in floodlights. Then a sliver of black quietly appears on the fuselage. It's a door opening from within.

Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of the CDC's New York team, enters and finds a cabin looking like a winged graveyard where everyone appears to be dead. As he begins to remove bodies for transport to the morgue, four victims are discovered miraculously alive-and relatively unscathed apart from complaints of disorientation and a strange soreness.
But this is just the beginning

At the same time, Eldrich Palmer, director of the global Stoneheart Group, monitors the JFK scene on TV from his sickbed in Virginia. Pleased with what he sees, he sends for a helicopter for immediate transport to a Manhattan penthouse. In Queens, Eph's ex-wife Kelley and their 11-year-old son ready themselves with the rest of the Eastern United States for the first total lunar eclipse in more than four hundred years. In a pawn shop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps named Abraham Setrakian takes it all in. He knows that his time has come, that a war is about to begin, and that the Master is Here.

So begins anescalating battle of epic proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected the four survivors begins to ravage the city. Eph-guided by Setrakian, and joined by Vassily, a exterminator, Nora, Eph's CDC colleague, and Gus, a Harlem gangbanger-fights his way through the next horrifying days, determined to save his wife and son before the Master succeeds in his unholy mission.

Why:
I haven't read a vampire novel like this in a long time -- if ever. It seems a refreshing take on an over-written theme. WooHoo!