So, I picked this book up a few years ago, along with its sequel, when Borders went out of business. I figured, I like Guillermo Del Toro, it's supposed to be a new take on vampires... what's not to love? Well, horror is not my first love in fiction, so I ended up forgetting I had this until I saw the TV show began airing last week. I figured I better give it a read. Because I'm one of those people that feel like the purest way to enjoy a story is through reading. Watching it is to see a fuzzy mirror version of the original, it might give us a pretty image, but it's not the real thing. 
 Oh, what I am saying? Shut up, Rusty. Get on with it. 
 Some complaints: 
 First thing, I was almost immediately curious as to how this book was written. Did Guillermo plot it out and let Chuck handle the prose? Did they each right sections on their own? Did Guillermo write it and Chuck clean it up? 
 I wondered this because I found this book to be terribly uneven. Some scenes were beautiful (like the one that opens the book with the small boy, in 1930's era eastern europe, eating his soup and listening to the tale of his bubbeh telling of the legend of the monster in the woods) and then others are like a 7th grader's book report on how to write drama. 
 An example, a character that otherwise doesn't appear in the book after this scene, is having a breakdown on the tarmac at an airport: 
 "This city," sobbed the officer. "This damn city." 
 Later, word went around that this Port Authority officer had worked those hellish first few weeks on the pile at Ground Zero, first as part of the rescue mission, and then the recovery effort. The specter of 9/11 still hung over many of these Port Authority officers, and the current bewildering mass-casualty situation had brought it crashing down again." 
 On its own, that might not seem like a horrific passage, but in the context of the novel, there was no reason I could discern for its inclusion. And again, it had a book report feel to it. Like it was recapping events that may have been dramatic, but all emotion had been stripped of them. If my complaint makes no sense to you, then please, carry on like I never said a word. Just know that I found sections of this very cheesy. 
 Secondly, the finest character in this book was Setrakian, who is probably in this 400 page tale for about 40 pages. He's an old holocaust survivor with killing vampires on his mind. He's waited his whole life for this shit to go down, and he's planning on making things get ugly. But instead of focusing on him, the book is really Eph's tale. Which is to say that he probably got about 100 pages of this novel. They weren't the best thing in the world, but at least it gave me a character to hang my hat on, BECAUSE.... 
 ... about half of this book is just description of random things. Here is a plane on a tarmac, here is a house in the city. Here is the operating procedure for taxiing a plane in from the runway. Sometimes it reads like passages were copied and pasted straight from a manual. Again, this is an uneven book. 
 Thirdly, the only female lead in this, really, is Nora. And I get the feeling that they turned in this book to the publisher, and the editor was like, "Um, shouldn't you have a woman in this novel?" Then, after some head-slapping, someone had the idea of putting, "and Nora" into most sentences that included Eph. Because that might be the most useless character I've ever come across in fiction. Look, I'm a guy, and I understand the instinct to make women in your horror book almost an afterthought, but this really seemed to be comically bad. Let's see, she's Eph's deputy (he's a CDC doctor, and she's also a doc, but lower on the totem pole), she's slept with him in the past, because he's so awesome, but he's totally into his ex-wife, who also loves him, but can't really handle his totally type A personality. Nora follows Eph around throughout the novel, only nodding at his wise counsel and continues to be amazed at how right he is about pretty much everything. Also, when shit gets real, Eph leaves her behind to babysit his kid. Because she's a woman, and can't fight. Because, you know, vagina. But she probably makes good sandwiches. 
 Fourth, I have a hard time believing that any massive vampire outbreak in NYC would go unnoticed for so long. This thing is played in this book like a zombie outbreak from hell. You're bitten, and 12 hours later you're a vamp. Two hundred plus people go out into the night and infect folks like crazy, and several days later, no one has a clue that, by all appearances, 99% of NYC is vamp city. I don't care that the CDC is corrupt, and that officials are turning a blind eye. It's like a huge revelation at the end that brilliant Eph decides to make a video and put it on youtube. So the world can know. There would be about 30,000 youtube videos on day 1. It would be international news with 48 hours. No part of how this thing spread makes any sense to me at all. 
 Fifth, at first, with all the CSI sort of stuff at the beginning of the book, I was thinking that this was going to be kinda of a sci-fi vampire monster sort of thing. You know, biological and messed up. I'm thinking the sort of stuff that Scott Sigler does so well. I was kind of excited about it. But from what I could tell, it gets full on supernatural, complete with invisible (kinda) in mirrors, can't cross running water, and sunlight laser beams. I'm still confused about what the authors expect me to think, I wouldn't mind guessing about it throughout the novel, but I expect something by the end. Instead, we get the promise that things are about to get worse, and a single line from someone out of the blue that hints that these things are really... POSSIBLE SPOILER COMING: 
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 Aliens. 
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 So I'm not overwhelmingly pleased. And with all that complaining, I'm almost not sure I have the energy to go over the positives. Let me try. Aside from the fact that there are some beautifully written passages, especially the interludes, I do like that the vampires are pretty gross. They shit while they feed, genitalia tends to rot and fall off right away, and they morph into something pretty damn gross in a hurry. So, yes, these are a take on vampires that make them very monstrous. I've already said I'm not a big horror guy, so I don't know how unique this is. But while the characters feel kind of cardboardy to me, these vamps are pretty scary. 
 It isn't bad. In fact, since I have the second book right in front of me at my desk, I considered picking it up and continuing to read. I don't usually do that when a book sucks. Was I too hard on it with all that complaining? I don't think so. I think I was giving honest criticism. Even if I was doing it in a dickish way. 
 In conclusion, give it a go if you can get past all those things I brought up that I found annoying.