Dark Victory

About the Dark Victory series

Alien invaders called the Creepers have gutted modern civilization -- dropping asteroids to drown coastal cities and detonating weapons overhead to fry power grids and communications, driving the United States back to a nineteenth-century existence almost overnight. Brendan DuBois's Dark Victory trilogy follows Randy Knox, a teenage lieutenant in what remains of the U.S. Army, who has been fighting the Creepers since he was twelve years old and has known nothing else. Across Dark Victory, Red Vengeance and Black Triumph, DuBois tracks Randy's war from scrappy resistance through escalating counter-offensive to the trilogy's final confrontation, filtered through a young soldier's-eye view of what total societal collapse actually looks like on the ground -- ruined infrastructure, occupied towns, and the improvised discipline of an army rebuilding itself from almost nothing.

Published as YA-adjacent military science fiction, the trilogy is DuBois's second excursion outside his usual crime and thriller territory (after the Empire of the North trilogy), and shows a harder military-SF edge than that series' more classically dystopian framing.