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Title | The Passage
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Author | Justin Cronin
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Cover Art | Tom Hallman
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Publisher | Doubleday Canada - 2010
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First Printing | Doubleday Canada - 2010
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Title | The Twelve
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Author | Justin Cronin
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Cover Art | Tom Hallman
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Publisher | Seal Books - 2013
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First Printing | Doubleday Canada - 2012
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Title | The City of Mirrors
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Author | Justin Cronin
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Cover Art | Tom Hallman
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Publisher | Ballantine Books - 2016
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First Printing | Ballantine Books - 2016
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Category | Apocalyptic
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Wolgast, Amy, Peter, Alicia, Michael, Sara, Hollis, Babcock, Carter, Fanning
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Main Elements |
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Website | justincronin.com
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The Passage
It happened fast.
Thirty-two minutes for one world to die.
Another to be born.
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, an ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivords is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear - of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.
As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he'd done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. Wolgast is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors, but for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey - spanning miles and decades - toward the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.
With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterly prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcedent work of modern fiction.
The Twelve
The present day: As a man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos - an expectant mother planning for her child's arrival even as civilization dissolves around her; an armed loner dodging the growing hordes of the infected; a teenage girl fighting for her little brother's life in a landscape of death. These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned - and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights.
One hundred years later: Amy and her followers continue their battle to vanquish the Twelve - a dozen death-row inmates transformed by an ancient virus into terrifying monsters, bringing the human races to the brink of annihilation. But the rules of the game have changed. The enemy has evolved, establishing a dark new order with a plan far more horrifying than man's extinction. And if the Twelve are to fall, one of humanity's heroes will have to pay the ultimate price.
The City of Mirrors
The world we know is gone. What world will rise in its place?
In The Passage and The Twelve, Justin Cronin brilliantly imagined the fall of civilization and humanity's desperate fight to survive. Now all is quiet on the horizon - but does silence promise the nightmare's end or the second coming of unspeakable darkness? At last, this bestselling epic races to its breathtaking finale.
The Twelve have been destroyed, and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew - and daring to dream of a hopeful future.
But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy - humanity's only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him. One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.
I bought this book when it first came out because of all the press it was getting and, well, it was a vampire story. It was a year before I got around to reading it. My first reaction was as I started to get into it was that, yes, they are "vampires", but you could call them zombies or any other monster that infected people become in all those apocalyptic movies. Basically I Am Legend.
But, I'd never read any of these kinds of books so I kept going. The book is over 700 pages long. While engaging, and interesting, and was I ever attached to one of the characters who didn't make it, it was long. It took me nearly three weeks to read for several reasons. It was interesting but not enthralling. It was dense. It was heavy. I have wrist trouble so hold this one ton hardcover for long periods of time was really hard!
The weight notwithstanding, in the end I did enjoy it. About a third of the way through there is a major jump of 90 years which I found quite disconcerting, and I didn't want to leave behind the other storyline (it was left with one big cliffhanger). And for some reason right about there, my copy of the book developped a major publishing error. The last couple of lines on the left hand page would repeat at the top of the right hand page which then *lost* the last few lines, they didn't spill over to the next left hand page. The repetition I could handle, but not the loss of content, it got confusing at times. And that problem went on, and on, and on and I was cursing myself for not reading it a year ago so I could return it. But eventually it sorted itself out. But be careful when picking up this book! Hopefully they fixed it in the paperback.
Anyway, it found myself quite disturbed by the story. I like my creature comforts. I can't imagine living in a world like theirs, worried about not just being killed by but actually becoming, one of the "virals". To have to live in fenced off compounds, and utterly dependent on technology created by people who lived nearly a century ago. After all, to keep the vampires away you need light, and for that, electricity. You live in small groups, not knowing if you are the only humanity left in the country, no idea if the rest of the world has ceased to exist, or is going on as if nothing happened, if the plague had been contained to North America or if it spread. You bring children into the world not knowing if there will be a world left for them to grow. Although it was amusing what misconceptions they had about us, our books, our way of life.
So I can't say if it's just another post-apocalyptic zombie/vampire novel or something revolutionary. But I know as I was reading it and happy that I was finally getting to the end, while at the same time really wanting to know how it ends, that there were too many loose ends. Unless the ending was insanely abrupt (and seeing as nothing else was anything other than drawn out) I wasn't sure what to expect. Of course now you are forwarned that there is a second book in the works, due out next year. And yes, I am going to get it because I want to know how it ends already!
March 2017
Well, I was away from this series for over 6 years waiting for the conclusion of the trilogy to be written. I had of course by then mostly forgotten what had happened in the first book, so took me a while to refamiliarize myself with the characters. My initial reaction to the second book was that it was a slog, seems to be a thing for post-apocalyptic stories (like King's The Stand) taking forever to actually get anywhere with really huge chunks of the book covering flashbacks. But about halfway through it started picking up, and what really made me happy, was that it expanded on the vampire mythos. No longer did the Twelve feel like bloodthirsty zombies, I was now finally convinced I was reading a vampire story. And as the vampires were made more real, so was the overall world and I jumped right into The City of Mirrors.
Once again, another huge flashback, which was interesting for say of the first half of it, and then got really tired of listening to Fanning pine about how he didn't get the girl. Turns out this girl is the key to everything, but still, could easily have chopped off a couple hundred pages of of both books each and the story would not have suffered. Of course I can't say too much more about the third book in a trilogy without giving too much away but the final battle was quite satisfying (so often the big bad guy falls after a paragraph of interaction with the hero, which always makes everything that leads up to the confrontation seem pointless, but not here).
The conclusion wraps up 900 years after the events of the trilogy, which was an intersting choice, however I had to raise my eyebrows at the fact that this society, 1000 years after an apocalyptic event which led to the human population being reduced to less than a thousand, is, well, exactly the same as ours???? With TV and reporters and clothing and culture...if you look at the past 1000 years you see a lot of changes, what's the chance you get the exact same thing we have right now? But I liked how Amy's tale wrapped up.
Debating now whether I'll keep these books. I'm a book hoarder but I'm running out of space. While the overall story was good, there was so much slogging to get through them, not sure I'd want to invest the time to ever read them again.
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