It's a big "if" though. This book fails on so many levels. I used to think that Stephen King's The Gunslinger was the worst book that I'd ever read all the way through. Then I forced myself to read this travesty cover-to-cover, and I found a whole new level of bad.

More than once, my friends asked "Why don't you just stop reading it?" They told me "Life is too short for bad books, AJ." But I persevered. And why did I persevere, dear readers? I did it for you. I couldn't write an accurate review of The Strain without reading it in its entirety. Anything less would be shoddy journalism.

It's hard to choose where to start when reviewing this book. Do I complain about the cliche characters? The infodumps? The complete lack of tension? Or the downright overall bad writing? I swear, it's as if the two authors said to each other, "Well, we're an Oscar-Winning Director and a critically acclaimed author. We can write anything and they'll publish it. Let's see just how low we can sink."

The writing is so bad that it is literally amateur in quality. It literally reminds me of fan fiction, in how goodie-goodie the main character is, how eeeeeevil the villain is, and how not a single character has a spark of life or originality in them.

Our cast of character includes the main character whose one flaw is that he's a former alcoholic who now thirst for . . . milk. He's a reluctant divorcee whose workaholic tendencies contributed to the downfall of his marriage, and now all he wants is increased visitation rights to see his beloved pre-teen son.

The main character's love-interest is so two-dimensional that she could have been replaced by a cardboard cut-out and had about as much impact on the story. For the most part, she exists to be supportive whenever the hero is feeling miserable.

We can't have a vampire book without someone who knows how to fight vampires, so we're given an old man who survived the Holocaust, encountered a big bad vampire, and dedicated his life to fighting them. He is of course the typical wise old mentor, and of course he has a heart condition.

Then there's our villain. Big surprise! He is a sickly old man who will do anything to live forever. And - spoiler alert! - in the past he had a run-in with our Wise Old Mentor. He also has the unlikely name of Eldritch Palmer. Seriously. Have you ever in your life met anyone with the name Eldritch? I thought not. And he leads the Stoneheart Group. Because that doesn't sound ominous or anything.

Our soon-to-be vampires include a high-powered yuppie lawyer who can't stand her own children and is obsessed with keeping up with/being better than her yuppie neighbors. She is emotionally bankrupt because she does not love her children and cares only about her money.

Evil Lawyer Lady has a Haitian housekeeper. In a humongous chunk of exposition, we learn all about the housekeeper's relative (father? Uncle? Grandfather? I can't remember and I'm not going to flip through the book to find out) was a voodoo priest who never dabbled in the darkest of the black arts, raising the dead. This is explained to us over the course of two or three paragraphs that read like they were lifted from a book on voodoo, so full are they of terminology.

Then there's the programmer whose wife suffers from crippling OCD, phobias and more. We learn all about this in several more paragraphs of needless exposition. It's as if the author wrote a character sketch, and then included it in the book. I don't need to know this much about such a minor character, and I don't need to learn it all at once. This family has two large, lovable St. Bernards (we're told multiple times how loved and lovable they are, despite the fact that the family makes them sleep tied up in a shed in NY year-round). I'll let you guess whether or not these lovable dogs survive to the end of the book (hey! Guess when I almost put the book down?).

And there's the rockstar who is such a transparent Marilyn Manson rip-off that it's not even funny. He's how we learn that not only are the vampires of The Strain not sexy, they're also sexless. At least twice in the course of the book, we have characters staring in disbelief at the smooth expanse of flesh where the rocker's huge love-muscle used to be.

Not a single one of these characters felt like a real person to me. It's as if they were all drawn from a list of archetypes and written so broadly that you could automatically apply labels such as "evil yuppie lawyer" and "debauched rockstar" and "wise ethnic stereotype" and know exactly how they'd act based on that label.

And then there's the vampires themselves. They're a peculiar mix of the old myths and new ideas. Silver hurts them more than anything, they can't go out in the sun, and they can't cross running water unless they're invited across. But they're also supposed to be victims of a virus. What sort of virus makes you unable to cross running water unless invited? Oh, and instead of fangs, they have a weird stinger at the end of an organ that shoots up to 6 feet out of their mouth. I'm not kidding.

According to all the reviews that are highlighted on the dust-jacket, this book is supposed to be an incredibly scary novel that breaths new life into the vampire genre. I just don't see it. The writing is so poor that I was simply never scared. Descriptions of gore are either so dry and detailed as to remove all sense of horror, or so ridiculous that I couldn't help but roll my eyes. After reading The Red Tree last month, I was open to the possibility of a book being truly scary. I wanted to be scared by this book. I wanted it to be amazing. I wanted to be afraid to read it before bed. I wanted nightmares. I wanted the darkness to give me pause. Instead, I was given tedium and cliches.

I rarely say this, but I think The Strain would work so much better as a movie than as a novel. Camera work and music could replace dry descriptions, so that gore could shock and startle us. The archetypical characters would work, because the 90 - 120 minute running time wouldn't give us enough time to really get to know them anyway. We wouldn't get any backstory on minor characters. They'd just be victims. And if it sucked, at least I'd only have wasted two hours of my time, instead of a couple of weeks.