In Which Many of the Humans are Even Worse Than the Zombies

I'm referring of course to the Mike Massa & John Ringo Black Tide Rising series follow-on novels, The Valley of Shadows and River of Night.  Holy smokes, are these books ever grim.

OK, here goes:  Start with a weaponized rabies virus.  Then, taking off with one of the side-characters from the first book, Under a Graveyard Sky, this tells the story of what went on at top levels in NYC as the zombies took over.  A live attenuated virus vaccine is developed by a clandestine in-house lab at "Bank of the Americas."  (Hm, kind of a thin literary disguise there, but I suppose it's enough to fend off lawsuits.)  Of course a ready source of viruses to attenuate is needed, and there are all these damn zombies full of it just wandering around attacking people, so why not use what's at hand?  Ethical questions aside, of course.   However, the bank security team doesn't have the manpower needed to collect enough zombie bodies, but hey, the local mafia's pretty good about delivering bodies when times are good, so they cut a deal.  Then the police and NYC emergency management want in on the vaccines, so now everybody's in cahoots.  It's shaping up to be the start of a beautiful (if shady) relationship, but you just know that somebody's got to get greedy and sour the arrangement.

In the second book, the NYC survivors (ultimate badasses all, plus a mafia moll along for the road trip) are on the run to a series of safe houses and ultimately to a BotA refuge / alternate financial headquarters site, where they hope to help reboot civilization.  Unfortunately, some of the double-crossers from NYC have gotten there first.  Along the way it devolves into a Mad Max-style race against a warlord and his scavenger gang en route to the BotA refuge and a nearby TVA dam site.  Meanwhile back at the dam site, just imagine how much of an anti-zombie and anti-raider defense a team of demented engineers can muster with the electrical output from a giant hydropower dam.  Bad guys behind, some really bad people ahead, and something called the "Big Bad" – what's bunch of zombie-killers gonna do?  Yep.

Bad, bad people.  Some really good, good people in the story too.  As with the original four books, these read like eating tasty spiced potato chips, but they leave an even worse aftertaste.  It's all mostly leavened by the grim humor – the "Russian lesson" in the last chapter is, um, to die for.  Then there's an epilogue recap in a few pages from a new-minted E-4 character's notebook that's pretty funny.  Little touches like those finish out the whole thing on a good note.  Be warned though, these two books make the original four book series seem upbeat in comparison.

So, read, or don't read?  I dunno.  If you can laugh at awful situations and even worse people, maybe.  The Valley of Shadows has enjoyable elements of a detective/police/crime drama, watching them circle around and learn to work with each other against the zombie threat.  River of Night is more down and dirty, think Road Warrior kind of stuff.  Again and as with the original series, it reads like eating spicy potato chips: hard to put down and possibly sickening.  Your call.

ps: Don't forget the four follow-on anthologies.  Those are definitely less grim, possibly more fun.