First Line of "The Strain"

""Once upon a time," said Abraham Setrakian’s grandmother, "there was a giant."

- Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, from "The Strain," an addictive horror book. I'm 162 pages and the slow burn of the beginning is just about to boil over. It's an excellent horror novel, containing a lot of good writing like this:

"That was strange. She was spooked now. Majorly spooked. Dwarfed by a massive, $250-million, 383-ton flying machine, she had a fleeting yet palpable and cold sensation of standing in the presence of a dragon-like beast. A sleeping demon only pretending to be asleep, yet capable, at any moment, of opening its eyes and it's terrible mouth. An electrically psychic moment, a chill running through her with the force of a reverse orgasm, everything tightening, knotting up." p. 17.

The problem with a lot of these horror books is that once the plot begins in earnest, the relative restraint of the beginning becomes overwrought both in terms of events and prose. Here's hoping this doesn't occur here!