Quick Book Reviews Blog

To start with a little disclaimer of sorts, this is the third book in a trilogy, and if you haven't read the previous ones, The Passage and The Twelve , then chances are you wont understand much or enjoy this novel nearly as much as you could. In other words, reading the other two books before this one is a bit of a necessity. Two books ago Justin Cronin started a vast, sprawling and epic trilogy called The Passage , telling the story of a few human survivors in the wake of a viral apocalypse, one that turned countless people into mindless killer vampire-like creatures.

A world falling apart is generally a rather complex issue, one that deserves to be explored from multiple angles... after all, world-changing events such as the apocalypse can give rise to many interesting scenarios. With the second book in The Passage trilogy, The Twelve , Justin Cronin continues to weave his ginormous web of narrative threads, both looking back at the beginning from a different angle and pursuing the stories unfinished in the first novel.

In the world of post-apocalyptic novels one would be hard-pressed to find a scenario that hasn't been covered yet. It seems that throughout the centuries we've managed to come dangerously close to exhausting all the possibilities for our specie's demise, and that's forcing authors to dig deeper and deeper into their creative genius to put new twists on things. Justin Cronin is one such author, and his efforts have brought us The Passage trilogy , with the first book being appropriately-titled The Passage .