"The Night Eternal" is the last book in the Strain Trilogy and I was really looking forward to a strong ending to cap off what has been a great story. Instead I got a pseudo-religious anticlimax.
How the story ends is no great surprise (although there is always a slim chance that an author will either let the bad guys win or extract an extraordinary price from the good guys), but, in my mind, having an obvious ending puts a lot of pressure on the authors to make getting to the end good.
Instead the authors spent a lot of time going into the backstory of how vampires came to exist, building a case for Mr. Quinlan being a Jesus figure, and Eph being the hand of God. All of this gets in the way of a tight storyline and spending more time on how people react under an oppressive occupation. It also gets in the way of any character development.
The two year interlude between the action in book two and the beginning of book three has changed the characters. The change is mostly in Eph and because the changes fit in with the character's basic disposition, they don't require much explanation. Fet and Nora have also changed, but their changes don't really fit with the characters as laid out in the first two books. Little is done to smooth this over either. The reader is just left to accept it.
That said, the book is not a bad read. There are some excellent fight scenes and the writing is excellent. The mythology is not uninteresting.
If you have read the first two books, you should read this one as well. I found it disappointing, but not without merit. My sense of disappointment is likely just a matter of taste for the direction the authors took the story. I'm less interested in religious mythology and more interested in social critique.
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