Looking For a Good Book

A few years back it seemed I couldn’t turn around without someone talking about The Passage and then The Twelve … books of vampiric horror set in the not-so-distant future by Justin Cronin.  Though I was late to the party I did read The Passage (see review here) and enjoyed it.  Now, still late a little late, I’ve finally read the second book in the trilogy.

After a man-made viral apocalypse that turned a group of hardened criminals into nearly-unkillable vampires, we scoot ahead a few years to a time when a doctor (Lila) is trying to protect her child from the evils of the world around them, a teenage girl is traveling through a desolate and dangerous land with her brother, and Kittridge – a man who was holding down Denver – find their lives intersecting in the middle of what was once the United States, where a group of people are trying to harness the power of the vampires to achieve immortality for themselves.

Going in to this book I had glanced through The Passage to remind myself of some of the characters, but sadly this was unnecessary.  The Twelve takes place decades later and has a different cast of characters and really a whole different tone.

Instead of reading about what leads up to the apocalypse and then the plight of the survivors trying to make sense of a new world order, we have the return of a strong militaristic government and hordes of survivors making an exodus to find safety in the large communities.

While the first book had a large number of characters, I felt I could tell them apart and I was really interested in what they were doing.  In this book, there are still a large number of characters but they start to look and sound alike. And I didn’t care about them.

There were moments that were really captivating.  When one man voluntarily faced off against a ‘flyer’ (or vampire or whatever you want to call them) and survived to tell the others the secret to having power over them – I was absolutely entranced.  It was a nice bit of writing and suspense building and a great ‘human’ bit inside this epic novel where the individual human tended to otherwise get lost.

This feels like Cronin writing a book that didn’t come as easily to him as the first, but because he had a contract he had to produce something.  There are so many better books that are epic apocalypse stories that you don’t really need to read this one.  But because it follows a real popular book, and the third is now out (sitting in my ARC queue), it’s hard not to want to read this.  Just brace yourself for disappointment.

Looking for a good book? The Twelve by Justin Cronin is a classic case of the second book in a series not living up to the energy and excitement of the first.  This is a pale follow-up to The Passage.

* * * * * *

The Twelve

author: Justin Cronin

series: The Passage #2

publisher: The Random House Publishing Group

ISBN: 0345504984

hardcover, 5689 pages