Peter is still the main hero, and his quest eventually has him leading a small band of misfits to a climactic battle with ridiculously poor odds of success.
Luckily, the handful of surviving characters from The Passage-including Peter, Alicia, Amy, Michael, and a few others-develop in good and fascinating ways, carrying the reader through the exhausting introductions of new characters you frankly have a hard time caring about. If the final book in the trilogy fails to account for this, it will retroactively harm both of its predecessors. Like The Passage, the narrative depends on a great deal of coincidence and suspension of disbelief, and even though Cronin seems to be assuring us that there is a reason for all this serendipity and providence, his lack of any plausible explanation makes coincidence feel like the writer's crutch. By the time Cronin pulls the character-who-turns-out-to-be-the-child-of-some-other-character plot twist for the final time, it's neither surprising nor interesting. Indeed, there are lots of mothers and babies torn asunder in this plot, and it gets tiresome trying to sort them all out. As with The Passage, this extended backstory feeds into the main story in unpredictable ways, but a good portion of it-involving a busload of survivors trying to escape the madness-is only barely and tangentally tethered to the main story, rendering it largely irrelevant.Ĭronin once again can't help but introduce several dozen new characters to flesh out his world, but his toolkit seems to be wearing a little thin as he recycles many character traits from The Passage, including the woman who has a baby that may or may not be her husband's. Surprisingly, Cronin revisits a couple of characters you wouldn't expect, such as the pregnant ex-wife of Brad Wolgast, Lila Kyle, and Lawrence Grey, the castrated sex offender who helped unleash the Twelve. The main story takes place a few years after the cliffhanging epilogue of the previous book, but much of the novel once again takes place in Year Zero, immediately after the outbreak of the viral apocalypse that went on to ruin America. This is The Twelve, Justin Cronin's follow-up to his massively successful The Passage. Too many people have already been lost, and it's not looking good for the scattered remains of the human race.
A mysterious woman who can apparently control the virals has been sighted at the scene of a massacre, and something unusual is happening up north, where a man who has been alive for over a hundred years is building a massive structure with the help of a labor camp of slaves. Even Alicia Blades, the New Thing, and Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, are changing. There are fields full of virals who apparently committed mass suicide in the sun, and the eleven remaining members of the Twelve are not where they're supposed to be.
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