Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Scarier than a really scary thing.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

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Following on from The Passage, this is the second book in Justin Cronin’s epic trilogy. It starts nearer to Year Zero, when the human population is decimated by the failed-science-experiment-creatures-that-turn-into-vampires-but-I’m-not-sure-if-we-are-really-supposed-to-call-them-that. We are reacquainted with familiar characters, and get very quickly introduced to a whole bunch more. Honestly, it’s a bit hard to keep up at the beginning but there’s no need to stress too much – mostly they just seem to be there to give us some knowledge about the ancestry of those we came […]

Yeh it’s pretty scary.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

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I did it – I read another fiction book! Thanks to Caesar’s Wife for continuing to inspire my reading list. Not long after turning the first few pages of The Passage I felt a bit like I’d started a Stephen King book – that’s the closest genre I can think of that relates to this novel. This book, the first in a trilogy, starts in roughly present day USA when the government is rounding up death row inmates to act as lab rats. The experiment […]

World War V: Part III

City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

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This is the third and final novel in Cronin’s vampire trilogy (or as I like to think of it: Cronin’s vampire trilogy for people who actually aren’t too fussed on vampires but just enjoy a big epic story). The first novel, ‘The Passage’, introduced us to the vampire plague and then jumped forward 100 years as the last vestiges of humanity desperately try to hold on to their grip on the world. The second novel, ‘The Twelve’, showed how the best and worst of humanity […]

World War V: Part II

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

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The first book in this series, The Passage (my previous review), has forced me to do something I haven’t done in a long time: commit to a trilogy. A proper, lengthy, complex trilogy. I can’t remember the last time a series got its hooks into me so well. Quite a few of my cannonball reviews over the years have covered off on the first of a series. Gideon the Ninth, The Hatching, The Mummy Bloggers… None of these compelled me to continue. But Cronin’s epic vampire epidemic series […]

World War V

The Passage by Justin Cronin

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Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’ is the first in a trilogy of novels about the end of the world via vampire plague. But there are no sparkling vampires here. No slayers. No blunt metaphors. This is a genuinely frightening story of a foolish government experiment that lets loose a horrific plague across the continental USA. The novel spans almost 100 years, beginning with an ill-fated expedition to the wilderness in Bolivia, continuing through the stealth scientific testing of the newly discovered virus on death-row subjects, then […]

Don’t read, not worth it

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

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Hello to my second unfinished book of the year. I just recently reviewed and really liked the first one, but this guy just wasn’t worth it. This is the sequel to The Passage and the same apocalypse with roughly the same characters, but you could tell me this was a whole new author and I would 100% believe you. The first book was all about worldbuilding the end of the world and the survival instincts of a wide band of characters. The second book boils down […]



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