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Guillermo del Toro adds ‘vampire novelist’ to his resume
Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro is set to publish his first novel, joining the current vogue for bloodsucking blockbusters
Guardian | September 25, 2008
The writer and director of the film Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, is set to tap what has become a rich vein of new vampire fiction, signing up with HarperCollins to write a trilogy of books about a vampiric virus that invades New York.
Kicking off in summer 2009 with The Strain, the trilogy will be co-written with thriller writer Chuck Hogan and, promises Del Toro, will be “epic in scope”. “The trilogy advances in unexpected ways and each book contains unique and surprising revelations about the history, physiology and lore of the vampiric race, tracing its roots all the way back to its Old Testament origins,” said Del Toro, who has already given the genre filmic treatment, directing vampire sequel Blade II in 2002.
According to HarperCollins The Strain opens with the distinctly filmic arrival of a transatlantic flight at JFK airport, “where immediately upon touchdown, all power and communication to the aircraft are lost and a mysterious sliver of black appears – in the form of a slowly opening door – on the plane’s fuselage.”
Del Toro’s fiction debut will be competing with another epic, apocalyptic vampire trilogy published next year, Justin Cronin’s The Passage. This garnered a million-dollar plus book deal and a reported $1.75m film deal last year. Cronin’s vampire plague is created by medical experiments, whereas Del Toro’s stems from a virus, but both may be easily confused with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, recently adapted into a film starring Will Smith, in which a plague has left nearly everyone with ferocious fangs.
This comes on top of a bloodsucking bookshop invasion which is proving very lucrative to the book industry. From Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Historian to Laurell K Hamilton’s paranormal romance series Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter and teen vampire queen Stephenie Meyer, the genre is flying off the shelves. Bram Stoker would be proud.