Hoping to capitalize on what the success of THE STRAIN, the collaboration with film director Guillermo del Toro, Harper has brought back Chuck Hogan’s 1998 medical thriller, THE BLOOD ARTISTS, in mass-market paperback. But the intervening11 years have not been kind to the novel, making it rather predicable and ordinary.
By the year 2010, clean, uninfected blood is a rare and valuable commodity. Virologists Peter Maryk and Stephen Pearse are working to synthesize blood for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (a stricter, more encompassing off-shoot of the actual CDC as we know it), but their work is interrupted with the news of an outbreak of a particularly dangerous virus in a remote village in Africa. They arrive there and attempt to understand and contain the virus before it spreads. But when their efforts fail, Maryk take command and bombs the entire village, its inhabitants and — they hope — the virus as well.
Six years later, the team successfully completes its synthetic blood, based in large part on Maryk’s unique immunity characteristics, and wins the Nobel Prize. But then the virus they thought they had destroyed in Africa reappears in South Carolina. This time, however, the virus seems to have a sort of agenda and almost an intelligence of its own. And once again, Maryk and Pearse set off to isolate, contain and eventually destroy the virus before it overtakes the entire continent and eventually the planet.
Even post-dating his story into what originally seemed like the distant future, Hogan couldn’t foresee the many popular fiction and nonfiction stories that would make his basic premise so familiar. But works like Stephen King’s THE STAND; the true-story detailing of the Ebola virus, THE HOT ZONE; and, most notably, the popular Dustin Hoffman film OUTBREAK (whose opening scenes are an almost exact replica of the first chapter of Hogan’s book), along with numerous other popular medical thrillers, have long since made readers aware of how viruses work and what must be done to battle them.
Also working against the novel is the irritating, back-and-forth shift between Pearse’s first-person narration and the third-person tracing of Maryk, the lack of any truly sympathetic protagonist, and far too much mind-numbing medical jargon (both real and imagined) on almost every page.
Ironically, the fleeting premise of the lack of clean blood in the future, how untainted blood becomes as precious as gold or diamonds, and the efforts to create a newer, more resilient kind of blood are the lone memorable elements of Hogan’s story. But he dismisses this in favor of his team’s race against the killer virus.
If nothing else, reading THE BLOOD ARTISTS today proves that Hogan was a good partner to enlist for the vampire-tinged virus of the del Toro project. But unless evil-virus stories are your specialty, you can forgo this reissue and go right to THE STRAIN. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE STRAIN by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
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I just don’t understand the big deal about Hogan. After reading his first two novels (including the one above which I just barely recall) I gave up and dropped him. But I succumbed to the hype and read “The Strain”, which I’m perhaps unfairly assuming was primarily written by Hogan, and still don’t know how I managed to get through the boring thing. There are a few interesting bits, but the characters are so bland and uninteresting that I found myself having to flip back to see who many of them were when they were making second and third appearances. This is one trilogy I won’t be finishing.
Yeah, after THE HOT ZONE and OUTBREAK came out in the mid 90s, there were a million cash-in books published–some, if I recall correctly were even closer mirrors to the originals than this one, with locale and body count being the only distinguishing factors. Hogan might be many things, but ignorant of trends he’s not.