The Strain had a very downbeat ending: Ephraim's ex-wife Kelly was taken by the Master and 'turned,' and she spends much of The Fall hunting for Zack, her 'human affection' having turned to 'vampiric need.' In the meantime, the entire infrastructure of human civilization is crumbling as the Master and his minions run amok in New York, feeding and killing at will, infecting everyone with the vampiric virus and orchestrating multiple nuclear catastrophes.

Joining the team in an uneasy alliance are 'the Ancients,' members of the same vampiric race as the Master, but opposed to his destructive plans for humanity, which threaten their own shadowy existence. In this second volume of what is to be a trilogy, the heroes from the previous book return: Ephraim Goodweather, the disgraced doctor from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his son Zack Abraham Setrakian, Holocaust survivor and vampire hunter Vasiliy, former exterminator, and Gus, a gang-banger with a particular knack for killing vamps. And that is exactly what vampirism is in this universe: a virus that infects its host and converts it into something other than human, right from the cellular level. Picking up the narrative only a week after the events in The Strain, del Toro and Hogan's 2009 novel, The Fall continues the story of a beleaguered humanity under attack by 'the Master,' the leader of a particularly aggressive and virulent strain of vampires.

Guillermo del toro the fall