Black Triumph: A Novel of Alien Resistance

DuBois underwhelms with a predictable conclusion to his alien invasion trilogy (following 2017’s Red Vengeance) that fails to mitigate its pat story line with any emotional depth or evocative imagery. For a decade, Earth has been devastated by the Creepers, who use arthropodlike machines to shoot lasers and flames, and who have killed millions and reduced humanity to “a nineteenth-century way of life.” Sixteen-year-old Sgt. Randy Knox, who has been fighting Creepers since he was 12, is reluctant to leave the U.S. Army unit known as Kara’s Killers, but he’s reassigned back to his home unit, the New Hampshire Army National Guard. His journey from Upstate New York is interrupted when he’s captured by Creepers and confined to a base populated by desperate humans who are forced to fight each other to the death. DuBois’s worldbuilding, plot twists, and characterizations contain no surprises and little entertainment. (Oct.)