“The Twelve”: Life in a vampire nation

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Nothing adds piquancy to a good post-apocalyptic audiobook like listening to it in quasi-apocalyptic circumstances. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when not boiling pot after pot of water in my frigid and lightless Manhattan apartment, I eked out the battery on my iPod catching up with Justin Cronin's epic, end-of-the-world vampire-zombie saga. It began with "The Passage" and now continues, in the second of a projected three volumes, with "The Twelve."

In Cronin's dystopian hellscape, "virals" harry the few remaining pockets of humanity in the continental U.S. The infected feed on blood and exhibit a certain animal cunning, but have no memory of their former lives. Each serves as a drone-like follower to one of 12 original vampires, test subjects in a military experiment gone very, very wrong. A couple of generations after these creatures have laid waste to the country, the more intrepid characters from the last half of "The Passage" continue their quest to kill the 12, thereby liberating their hives into true death.

Salon.com > Justin Cronin

“The Twelve”: Life in a vampire nation