Rating: 10/10
Synopsis:
Deep in the blackness of a long-forgotten crypt in rural France, an ancient and deadly nightmare has awakened. Its prey is already long dead.
But it will not be denied the revenge for which it has waited two thousand years.
In AD 9, during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, three legions were trapped and cruelly massacred in the Teutoberg Forest by an army of brutal and deadly German tribes led by a traitor named Arminius. Of the twenty thousand legionaries, civilian men, women, and children, only a few hundred survived.
Centurion Lucius Cassius Aquilius, the senior surviving officer returned to Rome filled with a lust for vengeance.
With the help of an aged alchemist, Lucius leads an elite Roman legion of nearly five thousand men into a cold and sealed crypt, waiting for the day they would emerge to find and kill their enemies.
But they have overslept. The year is 2021, more than two thousand years since the Teutoberg Massacre. The world has changed into something that Legatus Lucius Cassius Aquilius and his loyal legionaries cannot comprehend. But their cause has not died.
They will still march into Germania to seek their long-awaited vengeance.
Meanwhile in Brussels, a NATO legal investigator named Alex Braden begins to uncover a series of strange and fatal events in France and Belgium. At first, he is at a loss to explain them as they lead to an inescapable solution. But it is a solution that is totally impossible.
A living Roman legion has arisen from the past, marching into modern-day Germany. The greatest and most dangerous army history has ever known is out for revenge.
And no one knows they are coming.
Review:
Out of the Darkness reminds me of why I love reading books about the Ancient Peoples, let’s say the Romans or Greeks specifically, that devise ways to enter into the 21st century. This is a time travel novel don’t get me wrong. It’s like Outlander but without the emphasis on too much romance. I just love reading books about the Ancient World interacting with the 21st century. Or with different time periods. Now imagine a Roman Legion arriving into the Napoleonic Period. It’s like that, and I would seriously love to read a book like that. I can compare this to Baen Book’s series of the Alexander Inheritance. In which a 21st-century cruiser is transported to the era of the Diadochi.
This novel had me hooked on every page, every word, and it was such a vivid description of how a Roman Legion, or well what a Roman Legion would do if they arrived in the 21st century. It’s like a modern-day thriller novel. And these Romans are coming for revenge which I daresay…is a bit long gone. If you know the events of Teutoberg Forest in 9AD, it was one of the most monumental losses of Roman Military History that discouraged the Romans from expanding into Germania, but also, more importantly, the loss of Germanicus played a crucial role after he had defeated Arminius. Clearly, every aspect of this novel is well researched. I wish more mainstream publishers would tackle such subjects like this. I applaud Sunbury Press for not only taking this novel on, but they did a fantastic choice.
Mark mentioned that he was blind and that he wrote this novel using a wide variety of technologies while also receiving help from friends and experts. He also mentioned that this novel was 250k words and so was split up. I say to you, this novel will want to make you read more of it! It’s that good. I too have a visual impairment and have glaucoma in my left eye since birth, so seeing this novel is not only an achievement, it is a great thing. I also wanted to say: The writing is solid. The prose is excellent. The characters are extremely well written though I did not buy some aspects of the novel when it comes to the old world diseases stuff that meets in the new world. Those are just my thoughts.
I give this book a 10/10 and must read!
Al-Alhambra Book Reviews 