Way of the Wolf: The Vampire Earth, Book 1

How very glad I am that I chanced upon this book. It was a very exciting, thought provoking concept of what this planet could be like if certain things were to take place. This is the story of one young man who decides to become a rebel against the alien forces which occupy the Earth. This is the year 2065 and it is the 43rd year of the Kurian Order. The entire landscape of Earth has changed because of the Kurian rule, cities were totally destroyed and never rebuilt. Vegetation has slowly crept in to make whole infrastructures unusable. The rebels who fight against the invaders are few and scattered. Yet if you look closely you will find that resistance is taking place and victories are being won.A Kurian is an alien being who controls Reapers. The function of a Reaper is to hunt down their food source, humans, and drain their body of blood while sending back the human's aura to their Kurian Master. These are not vampires which are depicted in other urban fantasy novels. These creatures are almost unstoppable and definitely not ever going to be viewed as "romantic" no matter how you chose to use that word.David Valentine is about 17 when he begins his training to become a Hunter. He was then chosen to receive enhanced abilities to make him a fighter known as a Wolf. There are many different types of human guerrilla fighters. Cat, Bear, and Wolf are the three types with the most enhancements (read supernatural abilities) but those are positions conferred only on individuals who display special talent during their military training.This book was presented in a very interesting way. Each chapter begins with a segment, presented in italics, which gives a brief description of what is happening in this portion of the story, gives background information so that the reader knows how the "world" is structured, and sets up the episode which the chapter will involve. This method was very informative and kept the characters from having to repeat so much information. Instead, I read the introduction to the chapter and then continued on to read about what happened during this time with David. Only when the story got to the very last few chapters did the narrative continue from one chapter to the next. The final paragraph is not an ending to these adventures, instead it is an ending of this series of episodes. Lieutenant David Valentine is left very far from his military unit and a notation states very clearly that his adventures will continue in the next book  Choice of the Cat (The Vampire Earth, Book 2) .Please don't let yourself be put off from reading this book because it is subtitled Book One of The Vampire Earth. Believe me, these are not your regular vampires from Transylvania. The book did give me some small problems. There is a Glossary in the back. I wish I had known about that while I was reading because it would have come in very handy. These characters, both the good and the bad, are called by many different names. I found myself slightly confused at times. Also there are several points in the novel where the editing was a little sloppy and I had to re-read passages to try to figure out what was going on. In some cases I just gave up because I couldn't figure it out. Nothing major, but still slightly annoying. Also, the book opens with an adventure David and other Wolf soldiers are engaging in. When that chapter ends the author begins to fill in the back story of David as a teenager and the world he was growing up in. That was fine but the author never went back and finished the tale of what happened to the people in the first chapter. Maybe that will be covered in other books, when the time line catches up to that time period, but it would have been much more satisfying for me to have finished off that episode right then. These problems are what ultimately made me decide to chose this book as a 4 star rating instead of the 5 stars I wanted to give it.Highly recommended as an intensely involved "what if" story. The world as we know it has collapsed because of politics and an economic meltdown. Apathy on the part of the populace allows the Kurian beings to come to Earth and begin to take over. This felt very real and quite scary.

The aliens in this novel act somewhat like Cthulhu's great old ones in that they use minions. These act as proxies who go out and suck the life energy out of the humans and "feed" it to their overlords automatically. But these bad guys aren't the only aliens on the block. A well-designed backstory accounts for the two main varieties, which are ideologically opposed creatures from the same highly advanced race. Both types of aliens use a network of cosmic gates to cross the universe, having "recently" decided to invade earth. The good aliens are called the "Lifeweavers", and the bad ones are the "Kurians", and a fight between the two on how best to use the gates has caused a schism in their race that has made them the enemies of each other. On the human side of things, you have a loosely connected, ragtag group of rebel fighters who are divided into three main groups according to their expertise and purpose: Wolves, Cats, and Bears. Wolves are the rank-and-file grunt fighters who usually operate in small strike forces, but who can also form larger groups to stage bigger attacks. The Cats are spies, and they operate alone. The Bears are the elite, tough-as-nails fighters. The job of these troops is to protect the small, mobile villages in the woods and the more permanent towns and forts out there in the post-apocalyptic earth who are hold-outs against the Kurians. Some humans have taken the promise of good treatment made by the Kurians at face value. Some of these fight for the Kurians, or drive trains or trucks or do other jobs. Equally in the other direction, some of the lower Kurian minions can be domesticated to help the "ordinary" humans. It's a pretty cool future played out in frontier hit-and-run battles in the woods, on rivers and occasionally in big cities like Chicago, which is a rat's nest of baddies. I thought the early chapters where the hero, David Stuart Valentine, was earning his stripes, was maybe treated as obligatory, and slow in doling out the backstory. But this is worth the wait. The last hundred and twenty pages or so are very suspenseful and claustrophobic in a hideout where a romance also occurs. Go ahead and read it. I'm on book two, and with all the up-front stuff out of the way in book one, it moves faster all the way through.

The Way of the Wolf is the first in a three part series entitled, Vampire Earth.This is not your typical vampire, guts, gore and supernatural book. Quite frankly, if it had been, I would never have read it.This book is an exciting and compelling read about a fictional future where the legends of earth's vampires resulted from a prior contact between mankind and an alien race that is at war with itself over the use of human and other species life auroa.In the book,the part of that race that has committed itself to using human life auroa to prolong its own life has taken over the earth and the story is set in that post apocalyptic era.E.E. Knight spins about as exciting and interesting a yarn as you will read. It is one of the better sci-fi novels I have read in the last ten years and it is about the fight for liberty and freedom against almost unimaginable odds by a people determined to retain their liberty.My only issue with the novel, and it is one admittedly of my own making, is that there was simply too much profanity and one fairly explicit sex scene for me or my family's personal values and faith.I find myself feeling that it is, in a sense, too bad because I really wanted to find out what happens in the ensuiing novels, The Choice of the Cat and. The Tale of the Thunderbolt. Not too bad that I have those values mind you...because our society is founded upon and based upon a retention of those values by the majority of the families and individuals in America IMHO...but too bad that such a rich and intriguing story found it necessary to include them.All the same, I must say that E.E. Knight does tell a rich, intriguing, exciting and compelling story that is very hard to put down!

面白かったか、と問われれば面白かったと答えますが、では、内容に釘づけになったか、と問われると、そうでもないなあ、というのが答えになります。不思議な感じを抱えたまま読み終わりました。　本作品はThe Vampire Earthシリーズの第1作。舞台は近未来のアメリカ。地球は異星人の支配下に。と、書くと、なんか「異星人vs地球人」という構図を思い浮かべてしまいそうですが、この小説の面白いのは、異星人の中にも地球人の見方をするものもいれば、地球人の中にも異星人の手先として働いているものがいる、ということでしょう。先ほど、「不思議な感じ」と書きましたが、SFでありながら、なんか内容がとても現実的なことが私が感じた不思議さの要因なのでしょう。　本の中には主人公を助ける（アドバイスを与える）人物として、Norbu Oshima、という人物が登場します（第12章）。また、記述の中には、柔道の巴投げの描写に近いものもあり（13章）、ひょっとして著者は柔道をやっていた？とも考えられます。

I read it a couple of years ago and it again is a very exciting book and one that I kept reading well into the night. I picked it up again because we are finally doing this series with our book group, with the Author very graciously joining us to answer questions. (we are so lucky!)It is a science fiction book, it has vampires in it, it reads like a western sometimes and a bit like a war novel. I tried to tell my BIL about it and he said I just listed about half the book genres lolIt is set in the future but it feels like the past. They no longer have all the modern conveniences we all take for granted. They have had to go back to living off the land and it does read a lot like books about pioneers, settlers and the old west. Not only do they have to contend with this rough life, they also have to deal with vampires who drink your blood and suck your soulIt's gripping stuff.

The first book of the series of "The Vampire Earth". Each book is a stand alone. But I would suggest to read this novel first before any other

Hope I will like this series but not had time to read it as yet, have a pile of books to work through but am a quick reader

Thoroughly good read, well developed characters and fun plot. I will certainly buy the ret of the series.