Into the Light: Great continuation of Out of the Dark.

Into the Light (Out of the Dark, #2) by David Weber and Chris Kennedy
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

The Shongairi conquered Earth. In mere minutes, half the human race died, and our cities lay in shattered ruins.

But the Shongairi didn’t expect the survivors’ tenacity. And, crucially, they didn’t know that Earth harbored two species of intelligent, tool-using bipeds. One of them was us. The other, long-lived and lethal, was hiding in the mountains of eastern Europe, the subject of fantasy and legend. When they emerged and made alliance with humankind, the invading aliens didn’t stand a chance.

Now Earth is once again ours. Aided by the advanced tech the aliens left behind, we’re rebuilding as fast as we can.

Meanwhile, a select few of our blood-drinking immortals are on their way to the Shongairi homeworld, having commandeered one of the alien starships…the planet-busting kind.

This, as far as I am concerned, is a very good continuation of Out of the Dark. Out of the Dark was not great but not bad either. This one though, I enjoyed quite a lot. I was actually wondering if there would be a sequel to Out of the Dark since it seemed to have received mixed reviews with quite a few one-star ratings which I felt was unfair to say the least.

I quite like the story in this book. Humanity is rising from the ashes of the ruins of the alien invasion. Not only do they, of course have to rebuild from a material point of view but the also have to rebuild their society, their government and their political system. I, of course, especially like that in the book it’s mostly done right in the sense that they actually manage to get competent people running things. Not useless asswipes that care only about “sitting on the throne” like Macron, Senile Joe and Löfven just to mention a few of the politicians that we could be without right now.

As usual when David Weber is involved the combat action is very good although there is a bit of his talk, talk and talk some more in this book as well. A nice twist in the book is how the “Vampires” actually get a scientific explanation after a while. An explanation that ties nicely into the mysteries that will, hopefully, be explored in further books in this series.

There was a part where things got off track a bit when they went off and tried to negotiate with a bunch of backwater imbeciles that was more interested in political (and military) powerplays than anything else. I don’t understand why they even bothered since these primitives would hardly have been able to contribute to the overall effort anyway and it was pretty clear that it was a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

The ending of the book became 100% predictable after a while but it was still quite cool. I’m quite looking forward to the next book now. I certainly hope there will be a next book.