The Night Eternal (Strain Trilogy #3)

by Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan

Overview

“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 doesn’t 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 ‘Salem’s Lot,” concludes with The Night Eternal. The magnificent, if monstrously warped brainchild of cinematic horror master Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) and Chuck Hogan—whose novel Prince of Thieves, was praised as, “one of the 10 best books of the year” by Stephen King—The 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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061558269
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/25/2011
Series:	Strain Trilogy Series , #3
Pages:	371
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Guillermo del Toro is an Academy Award^®–winning film director as well as a screenwriter, producer, and New York Times bestselling novelist. He is best known for his foreign fantasy films, especially Pan’s Labyrinth, and American mainstream movies like The Shape of Water. Del Toro has published multiple bestselling adult novels with HarperCollins, including The Strain, which was adapted into a TV series by FX, and he is the creator of Trollhunters, Netflix’s most-watched children’s series.

Chuck Hogan is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Devils in Exile and Prince of Thieves, which won the 2005 Hammett Award , was called one of the ten best novels of the year by Stephen King, and was the basis of the motion picture The Town.

Chuck Hogan es autor de varias aclamadas novelas, entre las cuales se encuentra Prince of Thieves que ganó el Hammett Award 2005 y que fue considerada una de las diez mejores novelas del año por Stephen King.

Editorial Reviews

For vampires, Nuclear Winter is the ideal environment. With only one hour of daylight each day, they run rampant over the earth, capturing or devouring the few humans still remaining free. Millions of men, women, and slaved are enslaved in vast death camps across the globe, farmed for energy and labor, and eventually harvested for their blood. Eph, Zack, Vassily and other survivors struggle to neutralize this, but their meager resources require help and it comes unexpectedly in the form of a new race. The momentous conclusion to one of the most acclaimed genre trilogies of recent times.

Del Toro and Hogan’s horror thriller trilogy got off to a rousing start with 2009’s The Strain, but this final volume continues the decline already evident in 2010’s The Fall. Instead of building on the coauthors’ clever modern variations on the classic Dracula motif (e.g., the use of nuclear winter to make life easier for the sun-shunning undead), the conclusion is strictly by the numbers as the various New York City–based protagonists, saddled with personal issues on top of an almost hopeless struggle to survive, try to find a way to rid Earth of the vampiric plague that has overwhelmed it in just a few short years. Readers will miss the series’ Van Helsing, Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian, killed off in the second installment, since the surviving vampire hunters aren’t nearly as interesting. Still, the power and innovations of the kickoff book should lead del Toro fans to hope he’ll take another crack at a scary novel. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

The final book in director del Toro and thriller writer Hogan's (The Killing Moon, 2007, etc.) epic vampire trilogy. Since the end of the previous book, the Master, an ancient being and source of a blood-borne parasitic infestation with vampire-like symptoms, has exerted near total control over the world. His vampire minions and a few human collaborators have set up concentration camps dedicated solely to harvesting blood for vampire consumption, while the rest of humanity scratches out a meager existence, watching re-runs on television and waiting in terror for their turn to be hauled to the camps. Hope for humanity is at a low ebb. Nuclear explosions have left the planet in a state of near-perpetual night. Abraham Setrakian, the old-world vampire hunter who has been trailing the Master for decades, is dead, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, the epidemiologist who first understood the nature of the new threat, now spends most of his time in a pill-induced haze, pining for his lost son, who, though still human, is under the Master's thrall. There are still pockets of resistance, though. Gangbanger turned fearless vampire hunter Augustin "Gus" Elizade has set up base in the now-unused Columbia University campus, and exterminator Vasiliy Fet is working to translate an ancient, silver-bound book that Setrakian seemed to think contained the knowledge necessary to destroy the Master for good. When Dr. Nora Martinez, Goodweather's former colleague and lover who is now attached to Fet, is taken to a blood camp, Goodweather, Fet and Elizalde, along with the mysterious half-vampire Mr. Quinlan, must come together to free her, and then to find a way to end the Master's reign once and for all. While one of the principal charms of the series so far has been its unique, near-plausible scientific treatment of vampirism, the third book introduces elements of the supernatural, which is somewhat disappointing. Still, the prose crackles, the plot barrels forward with increasing momentum and the authors' knack for thoughtful horror and striking imagery remains intact. A satisfying conclusion to an intelligent, utterly chilling horror trilogy.

Kirkus Reviews

In this final installment in Del Toro and Hogan's trilogy (The Strain; The Fall), the motley crew of resistors (including hard-boiled gang members, a CDC physician, a pest control expert, and the mysterious Mr. Quinlan) unite to kill The Master and wipe the vampire presence from the earth. Not an easy task—there are few ways to kill a vampire. The method selected provides the main suspense, but the authors are skilled in character development and even manage to make New York City a major story element. Daniel Oreskes, the reader of all three books, keeps the tension flowing and brings the series to a thrilling conclusion. VERDICT The authors have produced perhaps the best vampire fiction in recent years. The Night Eternal can be enjoyed on its own, but libraries also should have the previous titles. Twilight fans, beware: these are not your cutesy, sparkling vampires! [The Morrow hc, published in October, was a New York Times best seller; the HarperCollins mass market pb will publish in June 2012.—Ed.]—Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA

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