The Strain (the Strain Trilogy, #1)

The novel opens with a fairy tale told by Abraham Setrakian's grandmother. She tells young Abraham about Jusef Sardu, a Polish nobleman who had gigantism and relied on a walking stick with a silver wolf's-head handle. Sardu's father and uncles took him on a six-week hunting expedition to Romania's forests, where the hunters vanished one by one, found dead outside a cave. Sardu entered the cave alone and returned weeks later, mysteriously cured and rumored to possess great strength. Children began disappearing, and Abraham's grandmother heard the tapping of Sardu's stick near her home. Years later, the Nazis drove the Setrakians from their village. Abraham's grandmother took poison so he would not be slowed by her, and he ran.

In the present, Regis Air Flight 753 from Berlin lands at JFK and goes completely dark on the taxiway: no radio, no lights, no movement. Tactical officers enter and find rows of dead passengers with no visible trauma. At his Virginia estate, Eldritch Palmer, a seventy-six-year-old billionaire who heads the Stoneheart Group investment conglomerate and undergoes nightly dialysis, receives word and reveals he orchestrated whatever occurred.

Dr. Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather, head of the CDC's Canary rapid-response team, a unit of field epidemiologists organized to detect biological threats, is called to the scene during a custody weekend with his eleven-year-old son, Zack. He returns Zack to his ex-wife Kelly's house in Queens, where she lives with her boyfriend, Matt Sayles, and rushes to JFK. Joined by his team, biochemist Nora Martinez and logistics coordinator Jim Kent, Eph boards the aircraft. A federal air marshal sits dead with his weapon untouched. In the cockpit, Eph finds Captain Doyle Redfern still alive, along with three more survivors: lawyer Joan Luss, computer programmer Ansel Barbour, and Goth rock star Gabriel Bolivar. In the cargo hold, the team discovers an enormous, ornately carved black cabinet filled with rich black soil, with no manifest and its restraining straps undone.

Abraham Setrakian, now an aged pawnbroker in Spanish Harlem, watches the news and recognizes the event as an incursion by the ancient evil he has spent his life fighting. At the Manhattan morgue, every victim bears a tiny neck incision, and their blood has been replaced by white, opalescent fluid. During a total solar eclipse, the cabinet vanishes from the hangar. Outside the morgue, Setrakian urges Eph to destroy the bodies before nightfall, but police arrest him. Three survivors are released after Luss's law firm secures a legal order. Eph misses his custody hearing, and Kelly retains custody.

Flashbacks reveal Setrakian's past. As a prisoner at the Treblinka extermination camp, he witnessed a towering creature, the Master, the ancient vampire that Sardu became, enter the barracks and feed on the infirm. He fashioned a silver-tipped stake, but the Master caught it and crushed both of Setrakian's hands. A prisoner revolt allowed him to escape. He later found the Master's coffin imprint in Roman ruins, but the coffin was gone. He committed his life to hunting the creature.

The dead begin to rise. Morgue bodies vanish overnight. The survivors transform: Ansel Barbour kills his family's dogs and chains himself in his backyard shed to protect his wife and children. Bolivar's body deteriorates grotesquely. Joan Luss's nanny, Neeva, senses something wrong and flees with the Luss children. Across New York, the reanimated dead return to their loved ones, their "Dear Ones," the people vampires instinctively seek first to feed upon.

Augustin "Gus" Elizalde, a gang-affiliated eighteen-year-old recently released from juvenile detention, is coerced into driving a mysterious van from JFK to a Manhattan garage. Later, he and his friend Felix encounter a reanimated corpse in Times Square. Gus fights it and is arrested. Felix, bitten during the struggle, is taken into custody.

Captain Redfern completes his transformation and attacks Jim Kent with a newly grown stinger, a retractable feeding organ extending from beneath the tongue. Eph kills the transformed Redfern but realizes Jim has been infected. Eph and Nora retrieve Setrakian from jail. In his basement armory, stocked with silver swords, UV lamps, and modified nail guns, Setrakian explains that seven ancient Masters once divided the world, but a rogue seventh has broken the truce by crossing to America in the airplane's cargo hold, aided by a human collaborator. Vampires cannot cross moving water without help, silver harms them, and sunlight destroys them. Setrakian estimates the plague will consume Manhattan in a week.

They test his claims at a dead passenger's home, where they find the reanimated father and daughter and Setrakian decapitates both. Jim Kent's phone records reveal he has been calling Palmer's Stoneheart Group, the billionaire's investment conglomerate. Palmer, who seeks personal immortality through the Master, has operatives steal Redfern's body and doctor security footage to frame Eph. CDC Director Everett Barnes arrives with FBI agents to arrest Eph, but Setrakian rescues him at sword point.

Now fugitives, the group gains an ally in Vasiliy Fet, a city exterminator who has encountered vampires in subway tunnels and basements across Lower Manhattan. Ann-Marie Barbour, Ansel's wife who has agoraphobia, sends her children to relatives. Enraged upon recalling that a hostile neighbor once beat her dog, she manipulates him into the shed where Ansel feeds on him. Ann-Marie later takes her own life. The turned Joan Luss spreads infection through her Bronxville neighborhood, and Bolivar's town house becomes a vampire nest.

Eph returns to his apartment and finds the Master himself, an impossibly tall being whose head bends against the ceiling. The Master communicates telepathically, claiming he has taken Kelly and will come for Zack. Setrakian, Fet, and Nora burst in, and after a struggle, the Master escapes through a window. Earlier, Eph had visited Kelly for a painful reconciliation in which she admitted she wanted to hurt him through the divorce. Racing back to her house, Eph finds her suitcases by the door; she never left the city. The turned Matt Sayles attacks, and Eph decapitates him. Zack arrives home unharmed.

In the police transport van, Felix transforms and causes a crash. Gus escapes and destroys Felix with reflected sunlight, then returns home to find his family turned. Hooded vampire hunters rescue Gus on the street. These hunters are agents of three ancient vampires who rule the New World and oppose the Master's incursion. They transport Gus to an abandoned mine in Pennsylvania to recruit him as their human operative.

The group traces the infestation to tunnels beneath the World Trade Center site. In a vast chamber, hundreds of vampires surround the Master's coffin. Setrakian activates a UVC light mine, a device that blasts lethal ultraviolet-C radiation across the space, incinerating the gathered vampires, but the coffin is empty. They pursue the Master to Bolivar's town house, fighting floor by floor. On the penthouse level, Setrakian suffers a cardiac episode. The Master crashes through glass doors into full daylight. His flesh blackens, but he does not disintegrate and escapes over the building's edge.

The group retreats to Kelly's house. Eph has Zack upload vampire footage to the Internet to warn the world. Kelly then appears at the back door, turned into a vampire and returning for Zack. Fet brandishes the silver sword, and she hisses and flees. Zack faints at the sight. In Pennsylvania, the three New World Ancients designate Gus as their weapon in the coming war. Eph, shattered, pours himself a glass of scotch for the first time in his long sobriety. The story continues in the second volume, The Fall.