And lo and behold, the missing persons from The Passage are found there, sound and safe, taken there by vampires controlled by someone other than the Twelve. There’s a very mysterious and heavily guarded city somewhere in Iowa, which turns out to be a working camp, created and controlled by enhanced humans.

But soon enough all the paths start to converge, and it’s exactly where the novel begins to spiral downward faster than any viral.Īll of the protagonists known from The Passage independently – and very conveniently – arrive at the same place and almost at the same time. Peter is dispatched to play a glorified security detail to oil transports, and Alice… Well, her mission has a more sinister outlook from the very beginning.

Peter and Alice are vocal enough and important enough to get their stab at another of the Twelve, but after they botch the job (and I’ll leave the details out for those interested in reading the actual novel even after my review )) they are sent in different directions, each with their own task. From the humanity’s point of view getting rid of them would mean much better chance of survival – but humanity has a tendency to look rather to the next day than to the next year, and so the problems of plumbing, food and electricity shortages, and fuel transportation will always be pushed to the fore. Worse, the human survivors are not enticed to believe Peter and the rest of his crew that there are other “nodes”, the remaining zero-patients, who are able to control to bloodsucking monstrosities called virals. The second installment shows us a world in a momentary stasis – the first of the Twelve, Babcock, is dead, but the rest of the monstrous serial killer death row inmates is still free to roam the realm of the erstwhile U.S. I liked the protagonists of the first novel: mostly Amy and Wolgast, but I was ok also with the latecomers – Peter and Alice, Sarah and Mike, and the rest of the supporting crew. I enjoyed The Passage quite a bit, enough to jump to the second book as soon as I finished the first. The review for the first installment, The Passage, can be found here. The Twelve is the second installment in an already finished post-apocalyptic trilogy by Justin Cronin. I completed my read of The Twelve when I was still commuting weekly to Warsaw and had a lot of time to read, and it was a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have finished this book.īut let’s start from the beginning.

Still, I do read, even if swamped with work, so my list of books to be reviewed slowly grows. I haven’t written in a long time – lots and lots of work.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin