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Guillermo DelToro and Chuck Hogan’s novel The Strain reclaims the vampire mythos from the fangless, flowery teen romance it has become with the Twilight stories, and does so with excessive, gory relish. About time!

The Strain — the first of an epic, apocalyptic trilogy — puts a stake through the heart of the sexy vegetarian vampire made popular by Twilight, and gets us back to what was so creepy about vampires in the first place: they are the undead. They are hijacked human forms, and their hunger is not sexual — it’s the “red-in-tooth-and-claw” variety that makes nature wild, ugly and terrifying.

Many of the novel’s tropes are familiar from post-modern vampire lore: vampirism is a disease (as in Blade); ancient tribes of the undead in league with human co-conspirators (as in Underworld); high-tech vampire-hunting techniques (as in… you get the idea). It also has much in common with the sprawling scope of Stephen King’s The Stand. But the familiarity of these narrative devices do not take away from the scary fun of the book, which you’ll plow through like a bag of potato chips.

But I’ll say it again: the best thing about this book is that it sounds a death knell for the sexy vampire, who has been annoying true horror fans since the reign of Anne Rice. Strigoi!

I never tire of the Apollo 11 story, even in this 40th anniversary year that produced a deluge of memorial films, books and articles. It (and the birth of Sesame Street) remains a distinct childhood memory, though I was only four years old. Rocket Men is an excellent and authoritative retelling of the amazing achievement, a must-read for space freaks.

Hardcore Apollo nerds like myself will already know most of the mission details recounted in this book, but that doesn’t stop it from being a gripping page-turner — even when it dips back into history to review Operation Paperclip and the frantic poaching of Nazi scientists after the war. The story all unfolds at a gripping pace, using the official mission timeline (“T-minus”, etc) often in the voices of the engineers and astronauts that made it happen.

In fact, that’s one of the best aspects of the book: the engineers are given a more complete voice than they are usually afforded on those “History Channel” shows. Another commendable feature of Rocket Men is the respectful depth given to the portrait of Mike Collins — the affably humble Command Module pilot who is so often eclipsed by Buzz & Neil in accounts of the Great Leap.

The book ends by reminding us of our baffling abandonment of manned space-flight, though it does so in a way that inspires rather than scolds.

Perhaps with the discovery of all that water, we’ll finally go back? I hope so. The next humans on the moon are more likely to be Chinese or Indian than American, at this point. I don’t care which, I just hope they build a little campground that can be visited by mere mortals like me.

The Gates (full title: The Gates of Hell are About to Open, Mind the Gap is the first book I’ve read by Irish author John Connolly, but it won’t be my last. Connolly stirs together a mix of fantasy, science and anglo wit in an entertaining manner that puts him in league with Douglas Adams and Eoin Colfer.

The Gates has been described as a children’s book for adults, which is pretty apt. The story surrounds young Samuel Johnson (one of many allusive names Connolly gives his characters), who by chance observes his suburban neighbors in a showy ritual meant to summon Satan and his demonic minions. Samuel is an oddball, and has trouble convincing authorities of the impending doom. His only steadfast ally, at least in the beginning, is his faithful dachsund Boswell (who is one of the most warmly drawn fictional dogs I’ve ever read of, btw).

Samuel confronts several demons as he puzzles over how to stop the arrival of The Great Malevolence, which is slated to happen in a couple of days. His conversations with these bad guys — always rational and probing — make for some superbly dry and funny dialog. And Samuel actually befriends one of them: Nurd, the Scourge of the Five Deities.

He finally gets the attention of scientists at CERN, who take his apocalyptic predictions seriously — mainly because their Large Hadron Collider played a role in the whole mess. It seems an exotic particle somehow escaped the atom-smasher, ripping a hole in the universe while the physicists were distracted by a game of “Battleship.”

Zany hilarity and fast-paced action ensues as Samuel and his friends (both human and demonic) race against time to close the portal to Hell before the Big Guy arrives.

The book ends with ample room for a sequel, which I hope is coming soon. The snappy dialog and Lovecraftian descriptions of the horrible beasties would also lend themselves to a smashing feature film… get to work, Hollywood!

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• A particle God doesn’t want us to discover? (timesonline.co.uk)

This past week I drank deeply from the 2012 Kooky Kool-Aid Kauldron, which was brewed up and served hot thanks to the release of Roland Emmerich‘s mega-disaster movie. TV, print and the wacky world wide web served up all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense in hopes of riding the paranoid tsunami generated by the cheesy blockbuster’s cannonball jump into the media pool.

I started the week by re-watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which does not directly reference the 2012 myth but does employ the same sort of imperious insult to “the Mayans” common in the doomsday theories. (i.e. “the-Mayans-couldn’t-possibly-figure-out-how-to-sculpt-a-piece-of-quartz-on-their-own” trope.) Despite this silliness, I found the movie a lot more fun to watch on the second viewing. I think my initial viewing was disrupted by my inability to get over how old poor Indy has become. But this time out I went along for the ride, enjoying its byzantine, paranoid plot and the arch-camp performance of Cate Blanchett as a Soviet dominatrix.

Next up in the doomsday cavalcade were the numerous “documentaries” that turned up on various cable channels. Most of these were dominated by “experts” on the 2012 scenario, such as Richard Hoagland, the former NASA consultant who clearly went off the rails a while back. These shows tend to be fun, and I can take them at face value (especially if they’re on the SyFy channel, which is truth in advertising). But I get very irritated when they give short shrift to real scientists, such as the one History Channel doc that selectively edited Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak to make it seem as though they were warning of an alien invasion (the snippets were clearly part of a larger conversation about life in the universe, taken wildly out of context).

A long and tedious cross-country round trip led to my next 2012 selection, and it was the most entertaining of the bunch. It was Whitley “Communion” Streiber’s 2012: The War for Souls, which I picked up in the airport bookstore when I realized my other book was packed away. Streiber’s take on the legend is a paranoid epic. He stitches together a crazy-quilt of “Mayan” predictions, UFOlogy, alternate universes and centuries-old Reptilian scheming, straight outta David Icke. And he does this with his winking, “is this fiction or autobiography?” technique that made the otherwise boring plot of Communion so fun. (For the record, I think he’s having us on, and I salute him for it.)

And finally, yesterday I capped off the week by seeing Mr. Emmerich’s big movie. I concur with pretty much every review I’ve seen of it: it’s pretty dimwitted, but the lavishly generated end-of-days is quite amazing to watch on the big screen. Major props to the army of CG artists who brought this about — the resolution of the destruction is remarkable. Every corner of the screen is filled with remarkable detail: far from the explosive focal point in these sequences you can pick out realistically rendered people clinging to collapsing i-beams or running inches ahead of the onslaught.

But in the end it was dragged down by the very formulaic plot and characters. I would have paid just to see a show reel of all the destruction. However, I will give the writers credit for one thing: they played down the “Mayan calendar” aspect quite a bit. It felt more like a global warming parable along the lines of Emmerich’s other garish feature The Day After Tomorrow.

Phew. I am overstuffed by this super-sized apocalypse value meal. Let us not speak of it again, at least not until December 22, 2012, when we will wake up to a world as dull and annoying as it ever was.

I went ahead and read Dan Brown‘s fun ‘n formulaic The Lost Symbol, which was a brisk guilty pleasure. It shares chromosomes with all the other Dan Brown Beach Books: cinematic pacing, Shyamalan-ish twists, elaborate world conspiracies and clunky expository dialog. These are not knocks: I wasn’t expecting Gravity’s Rainbow, I was expecting a silly paperback thrill ride, which it provided nicely.

However, I am duty-bound by my devotion to The Venture Bros. to point out that one of the main plot elements in The Lost Symbol — a shadowy clique of history’s greatest minds protecting a glistening object that can either save mankind or destroy it — seems a ripoff of the VB episode “O.R.B.”. The Venture Bros. dished up as much action and intrigue (and of course, pants-pissing humor) in that 26 minute episode than Mr. Brown did in his whole book.

Here’s a clip from [adult swim], which gives you an idea. But find and watch the whole episode for full effect.

(Hat tip to The Universe Exists for My Amusement for the funny “demotivator” image above.)