CBR IV # 14 - Fevre Dream by G.R.R. Martin

After the strain, another vampire novel for me! I have not made a secret my intense love for ASOIAF and naturally, since the next installment is soooo far away, needed another GRR fix.

Abner Marsh is a tugboat captain who has fallen on some hard times. A mysterious stranger, Joshua York, approaches him wanting to invest in his company, but with some very strange and secretive requests. York turns out to be a vampire who needs a boat to unite all vampires for the good of human and vampirekind. They however, run into some trouble when they meet the bloodmaster, Julian, an evil and possible crazy old vampire based in New Orleans.

I'm sorry, I am horrible at summarizing plot. Anyway, holy vegetarian vampire!! Now this here is a true vegetarian vampire. Joshua York is a vampire who grew up amongst humans, and as such, are sympathetic to us. He does not like to kill for blood, and so , he created a potion that suppresses the blood lust that vampires feel. As I said in previous posts, I am very much interested in the mythology that each author makes for the origin and characteristics of their particular brand of vampires. In this case, the vampires were the same, but also very different to the classical vampire. They died by sunlight and fire and drank blood. That is where the similarity ends. For these vampires aren't contagious! They were born vampires and could not make others like them. They were truly a different specie of animals. I think this is the first time that I've read vampires being imagined that way.

Another unique characteristic with these vampires is that they can actually eat and drink normal food. Their bloodlust only comes approximately once every month and it is only then that they feel the very string urge to drink human blood.

I liked the book because at the start, you are never sure if Joshua is really a vampire or not. You don't know if he is good or evil. Like the good Captain, you are also kept in the dark about the real nature of this stranger. I mean, he eats real food!!

The story is long and it spans many years. I like books like these but some might find it tedious. It really focuses on the friendship and trust between Abner and Joshua, two very different men. Hell, they're not even from the same species.

GRR has once again, failed to disappoint.

CBR IV # 11, 12, 13 - The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuch Hogan

I find different versions of vampire (and zombie) stories really interesting in that the mythologies always differ from each other. Whether they be made sparkly, or with long tongue/stinger, authors always make their vampires just a little bit different from the template.

This here is a trilogy by director Guillermo del Tori and co-author Chuck Hogan (whose work I'm not really familiar with). Perhaps because of this, the book is very visual and cinematic. You can really imagine it happening up on the screen and the pacing feels like a good horror/suspense movie.

The first book, The Strain, sets up the situation. An airplane lands at JFK. All the lights are out and everyone is dead. Infectious disease is the first theory and CDC doctor Dr. Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather is assigned to the puzzling (and creepy) case. In other places in the city, the players are being prepared for what is to become, by the second book, a full blown epidemic.

By the second book, most of the characters have met and the origin of the vampires are slowly being revealed, mostly through the scholar Abraham Setrakian, who has tangled with the creatures before in his long life.

The third book is the endgame. What was a vampire novel has now turned post apocalyptic. Humans are farmed for blood and our heroes are fast running out of options to destroy the vampire menace.

As I said, the mythology is what I find most interesting about vampire literature. In this case, vampirism has a biological basis. It is parasitic in nature, and contained in capillary worms that can burrow into a human body. Once it is the bloodstream, it changes the host to make it more hospitable, shedding of necessary things such as hair and fingernails and growing a long stinger which is used as a weapon and as a way of extracting blood from the victim.

However, there is also a mystical side to the story wherein there are 7 ancients, the original vampires, whose blood worms seem to have become sentient and can transfer their consciousness to another body when one is destroyed. They can only be completely destroyed by nuking their birth places.

The series is action packed, exciting and a pretty interesting take on vampires.

CBR IV # 7 - Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It was hard for me to separate the book from the movie which I loved. Hard also to tell which one I liked more but I think this is one of those rare times that the movie is as good as the book.

Lonely 13 year old Oskar is a Mama's boy. Lonely and bullied by his peers. He doesn't really have any friends. That is, until he meets Eli, his new neighbor. They form a friendship, a bond. But Eli is like no other little girl. In fact, she's not even a girl. Eli is a 200 year old vampire, stuck at 12 year old. She moves in to Oskar's suburban neighborhood with her "handler" Hakan and quickly causes a whole lot of trouble and dead bodies.

The plot of the movie follows the book very closely. But there are some differences, of course. The characters are more fleshed out, their back stories and inner thoughts stated. There is no need for the guessing of motives here, unlike in the movie. Oskar is less likable her, more weird and violent. Many of the ambiguities in the movie is made clearer. Hakan and Ely's past and motivations.

I also liked that the author took the time to follow some minor characters, such as the local drinking group. It made me care much more about them and their tragic lives. One thing that was totally different in the book is that Hakan turns into a gruesome undead monster. This is also one of the things that I like least. It felt so common horror book which the rest of the book definitely was not.

It seems that I could not avoid making this review into a book vs movie comparison. But this I can say about the book, it is good. A worthwhile read even if you've already seen the movie, there are still some surprises and additional details waiting to be discovered. It is also a very good book in its own. Dark and strange. Like its characters.

# 7 - I Am Legend (And Other Short Stories) by Richard MAtheson

That is an one ugly book cover. More so considering how much i was enraged, ENRAGED!, I tell you, when I realized how much they changed the ending of the film. It was, however, the cheapest copy I could find and I was really impatient to find out what the difference between the book and the movie was. So, I had to make do with Will Smith.

I saw the movie before I read the book and I actually quite enjoyed the movie. But that was before I knew that the book was really quite awesome. I mean, the movie was ok and all, but why didn't they just make another movie completely not based on the book? Changing the ending and even some details (like there are dead vampires and alive vampires, and that hello! they are sentient!) completely change the essence of the book.

Enough ranting about the adaptation and on to the book itself. It was good. Neville is the last man left on earth. All the other have been infected by a horrible disease that turns them into bloodsucking monsters. The first part was basically just about how Neville lived his daily life, in the face of vampire apocalypse. Surviving and protecting himself. It also tells his past, which is heartbreaking, through flashbacks. We stay with Neville as he goes through depression and excessive drinking (who wouldn't be driven to drink when faced with a nightly onslaught of scary-ass vampires) and eventually just deals. He tries to learn all he can about the origin of the plague and tries to find a cure. In the day, when the vampires are helpless, he goes out and systematically kills all that he can find.

All the "action" happens at the last third of the book when he finds a seemingly uninfected woman and takes her in. Eventually, he starts to suspect that she is infected, and that part for me was really thrilling. Like Neville, I constantly wavered between believing she was normal and thinking she was infected. And this propels the story until the end when Neville, in the final seconds of his life, realizes that he is legend.

The book, in making the vampires sentient creatures, elevated the book from being just a regular zombie apocalypse movie (like the movie version) and presents some thought provoking ideas on how human beings evolve and adopt. In having Neville as a SOLE survivor of the human race, it presents a compelling portrait of loneliness. Being truly alone.

So I gathered from research (wiki. shush.) that this book was the first time that vampirism was "explained" through science. That is, that it had a scientific, instead of a supernatural cause. It is also, I guess because of the whole wiping out humans stuff, the inspiration for modern zombie films. However, I think it is totally different from most zombie films, as I already mentioned. The fact that the monsters were sentient and are trying to build a new society is totally different from the zombies who just want to eat everybody.

Oh, there were other short stories included in this book, thus making it elegible for the cannonball read. The stories were ok, some twisty and scary, some were forgettable. Ultimately, none reached the depth Matheson reached in I Am Legend.