Travis_J_Smith’s #CBR5 Review #66: The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

You know what hope is? Hope is a bastard. Hope is a liar, a cheat, and a steal. Hope comes near you. Kick it’s backside. Got no place in days like these.

– Ben Folds, “Picture Window.”

Toy Story 3 should’ve taught me not to let my expectations rise too far. I fully expected to exit the theater with a new favorite movie. Not surprisingly, it failed to even come close to the first two, both of which reside permanently in my top twenty. Inspired by that as of yet unparalleled feeling of disappointment, I’ve attempted to stop my hopes and expectations from clouding things up to too great of a degree, to enter into each movie, book, etc. with an open mind ready to be swayed in whichever direction it wishes to take me.

Clearly, though, I’m not always up to task, as you can tell from my reaction to The Fall and, now, to The Night Eternal. Between reading The Strain and its sequel, The Fall, I lost all memory of the warning signs I’d highlighted in my review of The Strain, then was shocked to see them reach their next level of progression in The Fall, which is to say they, like the Master, began to spread like the parasites they were. Hindsight tells me it was inevitable. The Strain was no more fit for a trilogy than The Hobbit. Each can only be stretched so far, making filler a necessity, as something has to patch over the resulting cracks in the foundation.

I recognized the story’s limitations from the start. Wondered aloud how there could be two more books worth left in it. And, as much as I wish I could say that it made me cautious of The Fall, it didn’t. Nor did the harshly negative reviews that cropped up in greater numbers for The Fall. I saw only the promise the first book presented, not thinking they’d renege on the unwritten agreement that promise seemed to make with me, the reader, that they would act (and build) upon it.

Travis_J_Smith’s #CBR5 Review #54: The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Who knew those minor imperfections in The Strain would turn into the fault lines that would break this series apart into countless, indistinguishable pieces? Obviously, the answer to that question is, not me. Out of these 13, The Fall is perhaps the easiest to review because its flaws are so readily apparent and easily explained.

One, it’s an example of violence for the sake of violence. Characters are introduced for the sole purpose of having horrors unleashed upon them soon thereafter. It reached the point where I was legitimately shocked when one of the characters survived the perilous situation del Toro and Hogan put him in.

Two, partly as a result of its frequency and how little time the reader is given to get to know and care about these characters, the violence is pretty unaffecting. Like a low-rate horror film, it’s dripping with blood, but not a drop of it means a thing. They might as well be hunters themselves, writing in plenty of sustenance for the vampires they’ve concocted.

Three, the characters that have carried over from the first novel become increasingly unlikable, Eph especially. Oh, forget the fact that my wife is now avampire and hunting me and my son. This is the perfect time to rekindle the romance between Nora and I. And who even needs provocation? We’ll just go at it like nothing’s happened since we last did.

Four, and this is the biggest drawback of all, the book is a glorified recap, del Toro and Hogan piddling around in a sort of holding pattern before the third and final book in the series. It’s not until about three quarters of the way through that they stop telling us things we already knew, in new and (not so) interesting ways (ex. blog entries from Captain Obvious himself), and even then it’s anticlimactic as fuck. Readers are tricked into thinking our heroes will emerge victorious, if only partially, yet it ends up amounting to approximately nothing.

In short, you could skip The Fall and move right on to The Night Eternal without really missing anything of importance. What little you do miss, they waste time recapping in The Night Eternal anyway. So, yeah, just pretend The Fall was never written and thank me later.*

*This suggestion might later be revised to exclude The Night Eternal as well, as I’m a third of the way through and things have yet to look up for the series.

Travis Smith’s blog, containing this review, as well as others, photography, and more, can be found here.