The logistics of how exactly these new immortals mutated are left somewhat vague some are good, some are bad, some endowed with superhuman strength and others with mere eternal life.īut the big baddy is Horace Guilder - a character we met briefly in "The Passage," the instigator of the "Special Weapons" project that accidentally unleashed the apocalypse on the world. Not quite viral, but not exactly human either, these include Amy, the pubescent heroine of "The Passage," and soldier Alicia, who was saved from the brink of death by a timely injection of viral virus, plus a group of "familiars" to the virals (think of them as clairvoyant, blood-drinking helpmeets) and yet another group of quasi-humans known as "red-eyes," who drink familiar blood in order to stave off wrinkles and gray hair. Instead, this book switches gears to examine a new breed of immortal humans who have been infected, to one degree or another, with the virus.
Despite its title, "The Twelve" is not really a book about hunting down the remaining 12 original virals - Cronin clearly understood that this would quickly start to seem repetitive.
If "The Passage" was concerned with the battle between man and beast and the despair inherent in being a survivor, "The Twelve" has at its core the question of what makes a human being human. Through their eyes, we witness the war between viral and human up close - Army bombs whistling overhead - before abandoning most of these characters entirely and jumping ahead to 97 A.V., where those survivors from "The Passage" are now scattered across a settlement in Kerrville, Texas. Instead, it rewinds back to the first days of the plague and introduces us to a mostly new group of characters, including a PTSD-riddled doctor named Lila Kyle, the pedophile janitor Lawrence Grey and an amputee Marine named Kittridge. "The Twelve," the much-anticipated second book of Cronin's trilogy, does not take up where the previous book left off - 92 years after the plague began, with a straggling group of survivors embarking on a quest to kill the original 12 virals - though it does get back there eventually. His vision of a vampire-plagued America was sweeping in scope, intelligently written and devastatingly haunting. They brought about the end of civilization, leaving the remaining humans to scrabble about in a postapocalyptic agrarian landscape, battling the undead with crossbows and gumption. In his novel, the vampires didn't merely nibble on a human or two, looking sexy without their shirts on his man-made "virals" were a new vampire breed - crossing the creepy exoskeleton and superhuman power of the beasts from "Aliens" with the dining habits of Dracula. When Justin Cronin published "The Passage" in 2010, it felt as if he were raising the bar on the current trend for all things vampire.
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