The most credible and frightening of all the vampire books of the past decade.
San Francisco Chronicle
Bram Stoker meets Stephen King meets Michael Crichton. It just doesnt get much better than this.
Nelson DeMille
The stunning New York Times bestselling vampire saga that author Dan Simmons (Drood, The Terror) calls, an unholy spawn of I Am Legend out of Salems Lot, concludes with The Night Eternal. The magnificent, if monstrously warped brainchild of cinematic horror master Guillermo del Toro (Pans Labyrinth, Hellboy) and Chuck Hoganwhose novel Prince of Thieves, was praised as, one of the 10 best books of the year by Stephen KingThe Night Eternal begins where The Strain and The Fall left off: with the last remnants of humankind enslaved by the vampire masters in a world forever shrouded by nuclear winter. Still, a small band of the living fights on in the shadows, in the final book of the ingenious dark fantasy trilogy that Newsweek says is, good enough to make us break that vow to swear off vampire stories.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Guest Review: Stephen King on The Night Eternal
Stephen King is the author of more than 50 books, all of them worldwide best-sellers. Among his most recent are the Dark Tower novels, Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything's Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Bag of Bones. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
The Strain trilogy opened with an authentic wow moment: a Boeing 777 arrives at JFK airport with all but four of the passengers dead in their seats. The flashlight beams of the first responders registered dully in the dead jewels of their open eyes. Not much later these corpses begin to rise from their morgue slabs, and a plague of blood-hungry predators overwhelms New York. The first hundred pages of The Strain is a sustained exercise in terror that held this reader in spellbound delight, because del Toro and Hogan write with crisp authenticity about both the fantastical (vampires) and the completely real (New York City, with all its odd nooks and crannies).
What began in The Strain comes to a sublimely satisfying conclusion in The Night Eternal. Del Toro and Hogan have taken Dracula, the greatest vampire tale of them all, and deftly turned it inside out. In Stokers novel, Bloodsucker Zero arrives in England on a sailing ship called the Demeter. As with the Regis Air 777, the Demeter is a ghost ship when it reaches port, the eponymous Count having snacked his way across the ocean. The difference is that Dracula is confronted by a heroic band of vampire-hunters who eventually drive him from England by using modern technologyeverything from diaries kept on wax recording cylinders to blood transfusions. In The Strain Trilogy, the body-hopping Masterwho arrives at JFK in the person of Polish nobleman Jusef Sarduuses the very technology that defeated his honorable forebear to destroy the civilized world. Big corporations are his tools; modern transportation serves to spread the vampire virus; nuclear weapons usher in a new era of pollution and atmospheric darkness.
Only jolly old England escapes; the wily Brits have blown up the Chunnel early on, and remain relatively vampire-free. At moments like this, the reader senses del Toro and Hogan tucking their tongues in their cheeks and having a gleeful blast.
When speaking of the New World Order in Henry the Sixth, Shakespeare has one of his characters say, The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers. As The Night Eternal opens, the Master (currently having traded the body of Sardu for that of rock star Gabriel Bolivar) doubles down on that, ordering his minions to kill not just those in the legal profession but all the CEOs, tycoons, intellectuals, rebels, and artists. Their execution was swift, public and brutal. Out they marched, the damned, out of the River House, the Dakota, the Beresford and their ilkin a horrific pageant of carnage, they were disposed of.
With the exception of heroic pawnbroker/scholar Abraham Setrakian (who almost destroyed the Master in Volume Two, The Fall), the winning cast of human characters from the previous novels are all present and accounted for: Nora Martinez, who has traded in her scientists microscope for a silver sword; Vasily Fet, who now exterminates vampires instead of rats; Augustin Gus Elizade, once a gangbanger and now a hero of resistance. Theres also the less-than-admirable but fascinating (in a repulsive way, its true) Alfonso Creem, with his insatiable appetite and his vampire-repelling mouthful of silver teeth.
And theres Eph Goodweather, the epidemiologist around whom all these others revolve. When The Night Eternal begins, two years after the Master has used nuclear weapons to create vampire-friendly darkness all over the planet, Eph has fallen on hard times. His undead ex-wife stalks him relentlessly (he is, after all, one of her Dear Ones), his son has become a rifle-toting, obsessive-compulsive acolyte of the Master, and Eph himself has started popping Vicodin and oxycodone. Nora has left him for Vasily Fet, and Eph is viewed with distrust by those who used to rally around him. Justifiable distrust; he keeps showing up late for meetings and vampire-killing gigs.
Fet has managed to purchase a rogue nuke (its wrapped in garbage bags and looks like a trashcan), and the resistance fighters have a sacred book that mayif decipheredlead them to the Black Site where the Masters earthly life began. If they can destroy that holy soil, they believe the vampire plague will end.
Theres a certain amount of perhaps dispensable hugger-mugger about vampires in Rome and archangels in Sodom, but the main attractions here are the resistance fighters fierce dedication to their cause, and Eph Goodweathers slow and painful realization that if he destroys the Master, he may also destroy his son Zachary, the last person on earth he truly loves. Heroes of tragic dimension are rare in popular fiction, but Goodweather fills the bill nicely.
After a small (and perhaps unavoidablesee Tolkeins The Two Towers) letdown in The Fall, The Strain Trilogy comes to a rip-roaring conclusion in The Night Eternal. The action is non-stop, and the fantasy element is anchored in enough satisfying detail to make it believable. All the New York landmarks, such as Central Parks Belvedere Castle and The Cloisters, are real. And while youre discovering such essential vampire facts as the undeads inability to cross running water without human help, youll also find out that the stone lions outside the New York Public Library have names: Patience and Fortitude. Plus, come on, admit ittheres something about seeing vampires massing for an attack in a Wendys parking lot that makes them more real. The devils in the details, and this is one devilishly good read full of satisfying scares. --Stephen King
Review
Praise for THE NIGHT ETERNAL: 'A devilishly good read, full of satisfying scares' Stephen King Praise for THE FALL: 'The climax, all fire and brimstone, nicely sets up the third and final volume' Financial Times 'Enough blood-curdling action to set up a gory finale' News of the World 'Relentlessly paves the way for what promises to be an epic third book' Kirkus Praise for THE STRAIN: 'A near-flawless thriller' News of the World 'A rattling piece of escapism' The Times 'The first in a trilogy that soars with spellbinding intrigue. Truly, an unforgettable tale you can't put down once you read the first page. I can't wait until the next one.' Clive Cussler 'Blood and apocalypse mix in a terrifying story that feels like it was ripped from today's headlines. Vividly wrought and relentlessly paced, THE STRAIN haunts as much as it terrifies. I cannot wait to see where Del Toro and Hogan take us next.' James Rollins 'Diverting and never less than expertly crafted' Guardian
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