High hopes dashed

The Strain -- Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Perhaps I had too high hope for this one. I love Del Toro's movies - Pan's Labryinth was amazing and so frightening. I love horror. I also heard a great interview on the radio with him about this book. I also seem to love vampire fiction. What could possibly go wrong?

Couldn't finish it. At first, the set up was awesome. NYC - mysterious planes sets down at JFK, no signs of life, lights off, shades drawn, no communication with air traffic control. Great start.

It was written very much like a cross between a thriller book and a thriller script. It felt a little different than your typical thriller, so I really had high hopes. You could see the movie: time, place, visual, establishing shots, then some action. You can tell that people with major talent were involved with this. Saying that though....

I found it to be obvious, obvious, obvious. Not scary in the least, one of those books where it seems like no one in the book has any idea what's going on, but you, as a reader are hundreds of pages in going, "It's VAMPIRES. Coffins, you know, blook sucking, that's called V-A-M-P-I-R-E-S."

You might like it if you haven't read a scary book in a while, but, if you love horror you'll probably be frustrated by the slow pace and at the writer's innocence that no one ever read Dracula in high school. Not to mention the movies out now and the HBO series that is so popular.

oh well, Del Toro is still a great filmmaker, and I bet, Chuck Hogan, is probably a good thriller writer on his own. I'll have to look him up.

She hears dead people

Grave Sight - by who else but Charlaine Harris I might promise that the next book I read won't be one of hers, but it has made for some great summer reading. This one is the first in the Harper Connelly series and stars yet again a young woman who is alienated from "normal" society by a strange gift, the "gift" of finding dead bodies, among other things.

This book was okay -- it didn't grab me like Real Murders - it was better than the Shakespear book though. It felt dark - and it was a little depressing. I usually like dark and depressing, so I might go for the second book to see what she does with this.