Saturday, January 25, 2014

3. The Twelve

By Justin Cronin (588 pp)

This is second in a series that started with The Passage which I liked a great deal. I was doing okay with this book until about page 300 where I became annoyed. It's a post-apocalyptic scary vampires caused by virus abused by military story and lots of things were happening to lots of people but I had no idea what was going on. As soon as I finished I searched for a wiki to fill in the gaps and the most informative item I found was this which is a lengthy review by a person who hated the book. This person articulates a lot of what didn't work for me: the bad guys are uniformly cartoonishly bad, the good guys ever so good; amazing coincidences; magical parental bonds - everyone who has lost a parent/child is miraculously reunited; even the eye-rolling bit where one character has a mystical relationship with a horse. Nothing original here. Lazy "feels like a first draft written at top speed" writing. Disappointing.


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