In a matter of months, hordes of brainless killers mentally controlled by the original 12 experimental subjects have eaten most of North America a few isolated outposts try for most of the next century to survive and put things back together. What is impressive about that book, and now its sequel The Twelve, is that there is nothing contemptuous about Cronin's approach this is a formal exercise based on study and thought, but it has also a serious commitment to the virtues he has found in genre fiction – well-paced flurries of action and a deepened portrayal of the conventional emotions that too often become clichés.Ī government agency which mistakes ruthlessness for competence infects a bunch of serial rapists and killers with a rare virus and inflicts on America a scourge that combines master vampires with a zombie apocalypse. The first novel of his vampire trilogy, The Passage, was a canny combination of disparate elements – he had learned from Stephen King how to tear the world apart and set monsters loose in it, and from Tolkien how to set a new innocent generation on a quest for the cure to the world's pain.

F or the early years of his career as a writer, Justin Cronin won awards and got teaching posts for the sort of book that is described as sensitive and evocative then he decided to do something else, but to do it with the same seriousness and competence.

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