YMMV / The Strain

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Eph's vision in The Night Eternal is not one in itself, but a lot of the imagery in it (such as Matt turning into the Master, Fet having a rat head and smoking a cigar) is on par with the "Gutterballs" scene in The Big Lebowski.
• Cliché Storm: While the buildup and atmosphere work for the most part, the characters are rather two-dimensional and events near the end feel typical of a set up for a sequel.
• Complete Monster: The Master is one of the seven original vampires. While his six brothers are content to rest in their homes and avoid conflict with the world at large, The Master has been a sadistic tyrant, ever since ancient times. Crossing from Europe on plane, he kills and turns every passenger so when they revive, he sends them to feed on their loved ones, slowly building a vampire army. When the time is right, the Master initiates through his minions multiple nuclear explosions by destroying silos to kill the six other ancients, and blots out the sun, establishing a vampire kingdom where humans are cattle for his kind, locked in camps and used for blood. The Master shows a penchant for murder and torture for his own amusement as well, even keeping a minion he turned back in the second World War from the Nazi ranks to torment his Arch-Enemy, a vampire hunting concentration camp survivor.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Vasily Fet in The Strain. He became a favorite of fans and the authors, and as such was a Breakout Character in The Fall.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Master has been watching humanity for centuries, waiting for precisely the right moment to unleash his vampire plague, and chose the early 21st century because: 1) with modern travel and communications, it has never been easier for diseases to spread quickly on a worldwide scale; 2) the various nations are so politically divided and suspicious of each other that it becomes impossible for them to coordinate a united response to the crisis; and 3) on a societal level, humans are so wrapped up in their own conceptions of what's important - their careers, their relationships, and their individual sense of self-worth - that they will ignore clear warnings of a risk to themselves and their families until it is too late to act. These observations ceased to be science fiction during COVID-19.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Master was always a spirit of pure evil, drawn to the carnage and suffering of human beings. What really cemented him as an irredeemable bastard, however, is how he deceived the nations into nuking each other, transforming the planet into a haven for vampires in which humans are rounded up like cattle and imprisoned in blood camps.
• Narm: The constant use of similes can reach comical levels.
• Nightmare Fuel: There is nothing romantic about these vampires. Nothing at all.
• Sequelitis: Many readers who loved the take on vampires as biological abominations described as "viruses incarnate" hated when The Night Eternal revealed them to be descendants of a fallen angel, completely retconning the scientific explanations for most of their weaknesses. Besides that, they found Eph's storyline to be tedious and wangst-ridden.
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
• Wangst: A common criticism of Eph, given the depression he fell into over Zack's abduction, which inevitably leads to him strongly considering selling out the human race to the Master just to see his son again.