In 2010, just when we’d all had enough of Bowflex vampires, the Count got a desperately needed transfusion from an unlikely donor: An English professor at Rice University named Justin Cronin had been patiently digging in the graveyard of literary fiction for 20 years. He’d graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’d received nice reviews and won a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award — prizes that can drive dozens of people to buy your books. . . .
But then his 9-year-old daughter suggested he write about a girl who saves humanity from destruction, and the undead swooped in with a multimillion-dollar book-and-movie deal.
“The Passage,” Book 1 of Cronin’s vampire apocalypse, was the scariest, most entertaining novel I’d read in a long time. The story described a government experiment that accidentally unleashes a dozen rapacious vampires who kill or enlist almost everyone in the United States, toppling the government, destroying the economy and leaving the country with just a few isolated pockets of terrified survivors struggling to keep the lights on. Somehow, the author of such quiet, tender stories as “Mary and O’Neil” had a facility with suspense and terror that could make you check the locks (twice), mix up a garlic smoothie and rush through pages till long past midnight. Here were the necrotic limbs of classic horror and biomedical thrillers zapped back to life by a writer of engaging characters, transporting scenes and elegantly creepy language.
Now, finally, comes the long-awaited second volume, and as much as it pains me to say it, “The Twelve” bites.
Fans will remember that Book 1 ended with a heart-pounding confrontation and chase scene. We’ve all been waiting to see what happens next to those valiant warriors, but Book 2 opens at the speed of a zombie crawl. Inexplicably, we’re back at Year Zero, when the vampires first escaped from a secret Colorado lab. Not that there’s much drama involved this time around: These snapshots of collapsing civilization seem incidental compared with the cacophony of panic that Cronin created in Book 1. Given what we already know, this 150-page interlude involving a grieving mother and a Machiavellian government official is all backing and filling. My canine teeth came in faster.
What’s truly bizarre is that a novel so burdened with exposition manages to provide so little necessary explanation. Don’t even think about starting this volume if you haven’t committed the first one to memory. I’m reminded of that famous quip about Henry James Sr., who wrote a book called “The Secret of Swedenborg” and kept it. In “The Twelve,” disembodied presences whisper enigmatic messages; characters you thought were dead aren’t (sort of); everyone suffers from old traumas they don’t want to talk about. Names, places and references to previous events churn through these pages in a soporific blur. It’s like going to your second wife’s 20th high-school reunion.
The first excitement saunters in around Page 200, when a couple of brave soldiers from Book 1, Alicia and Peter, are tracking down one of the original 12 “virals” in a cave. But even that spooky scene is over before you can say “Vlad the Impaler.” Who is that creature they find deep underground? What are the virals plotting? Cronin is so good with the careful, restrained building of terror that the real mystery here is why he gives himself so little room to do it.
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