Review: The Twelve by Justin Cronin

By Justin Cronin. Ballantine Books, $28.

Shelve your vampire crushes and prejudices—the super fast homicidal bloodsuckers of Justin Cronin’s 2010 blockbuster The Passage aren’t the sparkly, sexy type. In this second volume of the trilogy, the creatures (called “virals”) are back; also, the series continues to feel like a mishmash of The Stand, World War Z and The Walking Dead as whipped together by a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As with part one, the book takes place both right when things went to hell—the U.S. military’s supersoldier virus instead made supermonsters, who’s surprised?—and at a point in the future, several generations later. Those post-post-apocalyptic sections are strongest, following Cronin’s ragtag band of vampire hunters, including the immortal little girl who might hold the key to humanity’s survival.

Like Stephen King before him, Cronin is at his best when tracing the minutiae of life after civilization, winding his way through the patched-together world of human survivors in Texas. He excels at conjuring the varying states of mind that arise during the vampire crisis: confusion, denial, horror, insanity. The end of the world is even worse when you can’t think straight. The dozen infected ringleaders—the 12 that anchor the monster plague—are never as sharply drawn as the normal people; Cronin successfully combats this by introducing some new vampire-human hybrids with more interesting and complex stories. This brick of a book is as breathless a read as the trilogy’s first, satisfying for anyone who stayed up nights with The Passage. But real horror fans may hope that the final installment, due in 2014, has a little more going bump in the night.

Justin Cronin reads at Barnes & Noble Tribeca Tue 16.

 Buy The Twelve on Amazon
 Get The Twelve on your Kindle