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 s. 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 Stoker’s 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 technology—everything from diaries kept on wax
cylinders to blood transfusions. In The Strain Trilogy, the
body-hopping Master—who arrives at JFK in the person of Polish
nobleman Jusef Sardu—uses 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
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, let’s 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 ilk…in 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 scientist’s micro for a silver ; Vasily
Fet, who now exterminates vampires instead of rats; Augustin
“Gus” Elizade, once a gangbanger and now a hero of resistance.
There’s also the less-than-admirable but fascinating (in a
repulsive way, it’s true) Alfonso Creem, with his insatiable
appetite and his vampire-repelling mouthful of silver teeth.
And there’s 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
-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 (it’s wrapped in
garbage bags and looks like a tcan), and the resistance
fighters have a sacred book that may—if deciphered—lead them to
the Black Site where the Master’s earthly life began. If they can
destroy that holy soil, they believe the vampire plague will end.
There’s a certain a 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 Goodweather’s 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 unavoidable—see Tolkein’s 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 Park’s Belvedere Castle and The
Cloisters, are real. And while you’re discovering such essential
vampire facts as the undead’s inability to cross running water
without human help, you’ll also find out that the stone lions
outside the New York Public Library have names: Patience and
Fortitude. Plus, come on, admit it—there’s something about seeing
vampires massing for an attack in a Wendy’s parking lot that
makes them more real. The devil’s in the details, and this is one
devilishly good read full of satisfying es. --Stephen King