Book review: 'The Fall'

Book: The Fall

Author: Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan
l HarperCollins
l 390 pages
l Rs250

Hardcore lovers of vampire fiction have not tasted blood for some time now. A majority of them have been feeding on synthetic blood substitutes, a product category where the biggest market share is held by a literary werewolf named Stephenie Meyer. Her sickly sweet concoctions, peddled under the brand name ‘Twilight Series’, had hardly any vomit-inducing gore.

In fact, earlier this year, an English professor called Justin Cronin struck a blow for true-blood vampire fiction with The Passage, a magnificent work of apocalyptic fiction. But readers will have to wait till 2012 for the second part of Cronin’s trilogy.

In the meantime, they can snack on The Fall, the second book of Messrs. Del Toro and Hogan’s own vampire trilogy. The first instalment, The Strain, unleashed upon the world in 2009, sets in motion a chain of events wherein The Master, a powerful vampire, one of the seven Ancients, lands in New York with the aim of gaining control over the human race.

As New York’s population falls prey to the vampiric virus, Dr Ephraim Goodweather, an epidemiologist, Abraham Setrakian, an old Romanian Jew, and Vasily Fet, a rat catcher employed with the New York Bureau of Pest Control, come together to fight the pandemic.

The Fall takes off where The Strain ends, in a New York that is fast moving toward apocalypse. Eldritch Palmer, a dying billionaire who craves immortality, is strung along by The Master with false promises, and together they take over a nuclear power plant near New York as part of a larger plan to convert humans into blood banks for a vampire ruling class.

The authors take painstaking care to ensure logical consistency in their depiction of vampire biology. The vampire in The Fall, with flesh like “pickled pig foetus”, no nose to speak of, atrophied ears, and blood worms floating beneath translucent skin, are a far cry from the chocolaty good looks of an Edward Cullen.

The authors also weave in acute social commentary that inverts, and explodes, some of the foundational shibboleths of modernity — the idea of evolution, progress, division of labour, and the necessity of an enlightened elite that will decide the fate of the working/ consuming masses.

Just like in The Strain, the climax zips past faster than you can turn the pages. The last line, “The Night Eternal had begun,” is a direct invitation to the final instalment of the trilogy, titled, The Night Eternal, due later this year. The vampires in this trilogy are not exactly the kind of people you might want to date — they are viruses. But they are perhaps the most richly characterised viruses in the history of non-viral writing. Go ahead, get infected.