Book Review :: The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

The Twelve by Justin Cronin
Series: The Passage
Also in this series: The Passage, The City of Mirrors
Published by Orion
on October 16th 2012
Genres: Fiction, Horror, Science Fiction
Pages: 576
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It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Infecting twelve death-row prisoners with an ancient virus, in order to create human weapons. Instead, the virus turned them into ravening unstoppable monsters. And when the Twelve broke out of the underground facility where they had been born, all hell was truly unleashed.

In a world now ravaged by the viral plague, humanity is reduced to stubborn pockets of resistance. But if the human race is to have a future, survival is not enough. Against terrifying odds, they must hunt down the Twelve and destroy them in their lairs.

But something is wrong. The virals' behaviour is inexplicably changing. And all the clues point toward the Homeland, a sinister dictatorship where an unlikely trio are re-imagining humanity s destiny: Horace Guilder, a veteran of the original experiment with a blood-curdling vision of immortality; Lila Kyle, a woman whose tragic past has turned her into a figure of nightmare; and Lawrence Grey, a man whose search for connections has been fulfilled in the most gruesome way imaginable.

And then there is Amy. The Girl From Nowhere. Once the thirteenth test subject and now the only human who can fathom the Homeland's secret and truly enter the hive minds of the Twelve.

But what she finds there may spell the end of everything.

Last updated on 7 June 2022

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What is The Twelve about?

The Twelve, Justin Cronin’s second book in The Passage series, is just as fast-paced and character-filled as the beginning of the series, and yet for some reason, I didn’t enjoy it as much.

After the beginnings of the Twelve original virals in Cronin’s first book in this series, The Passage, Amy, Alicia, Peter and others are on the hunt for them to end the spread of the vampire-like virus before it consumes the entire world. I find that this book is a hard one to summarise, but in (very) short, the characters from The Passage have split up from their group, and are all over the place, doing various things in order to figure out how to rid the world of virals.

“As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.”

Peter has joined the Expeditionary, Alicia is on a mission to find the home of one of the Twelve as the government has been trying to find them for 5 years now and it looks like they’re giving up.

Sara (who is now called Dani), who was thought dead in The Passage is alive and gets herself a role as a Nanny for a woman named Lila, who, it turns out, is crazy and has Sara’s daughter.

Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, is working in an orphanage for part of the book, then eventually heads to Iowa, and near the end of the book all the parties find each other, and there’s a huge fight. I won’t tell you anymore, for fear of ruining the book for you, but it’s pretty intense.

My thoughts on The Twelve by Justin Cronin

Warning: It may not be a good idea to read this if you haven’t read The Passage or The Twelve yet.

The Twelve isn’t linear – it doesn’t start at one point in time and continues on in that same direction for the duration of the book – though it is all heading in the same direction. At the start, we read about what happened in Year Zero, the year the viral outbreak occurred, and from there there are scattered sections, jumping back to year zero and what happened around that time. Despite this, however, it does seem to have enough flow that it all makes sense in the long run.

“Because that’s what heaven is…it’s opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.”

I did think it was going to be more about the main characters (Peter, Alicia, Amy) but there was a lot about previous characters from the time before the breakout and some others who pop up for chapters here and there.

One thing that I struggled with was the length of the paragraphs. Occasionally a paragraph would take up an entire page and there would just be no white space at all. It may it physically hard to read and I found myself just skimming to the end. I know that this is probably bad, but when something is hard to read, you’re not as dedicated to reading every single word.

On the whole, however, it was a good book, and while I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Passage, it was fast-moving, interesting, and everything you’d expect a sequel to The Passage to be.

Have you read The Twelve? What did you think?