My Spanish is not good. I was never fluent, but I lived in Mexico for 5 years and I took IB Spanish, which involved a lot of reading and a lot of talking, so I was pretty capable. Over the past 10 years, however, it has totally deteriorated. I can’t even speak to people I know who speak Spanish in Spanish because I am so embarrassed about my accent and lack of ability to conjugate verbs.

But I am determined to improve! So, I decided to read a book in Spanish.

Nocturna is called ‘The Strain’ in English and is by director Guillermo del Toro. One night a plane lands at JFK airport and as soon as it touches down, it stops. The lights go off, the engines die, it stops on the landing strip, and no one is responding to radio messages. A team goes in and finds all but four of the passengers dead. The corpses are distributed amongst the four biggest hospitals for analysis. Was it a virus? A deadly gas? A terrorist attack? The event seems impossible.

Then, when the autopsies begin, everything seems even more unlikely. The bodies are still growing, internally. New organs are developing like a cancer, growing over the heart and throat, taking over the bodies. Then when night falls, even those bodies that have been sliced open from end to end in the autopsy start to get up and walk again.

This is a story about vampires. I had heard that the writing wasn’t great, but as I only understood 90% of the words, writing style was really the last thing I was thinking about! I found the first 2/3 utterly gripping, but I had started to become quite bored by the end. Just kill them already! I kept thinking. But still, a good premise with some truly creepy vampires and best of all, I READ THE WHOLE THING IN SPANISH! Now to look up the 10% of words that are underlined…

The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan