Romero's cinematic commentaries on self-devouring brainless consumer culture aside, our financial dead end post-2008 GFC finds people on some level longing for the zombie apocalypse to nullify personal debt and shed the mundanity of their lives for a more videogame/comicbook survival scenario.
I still vote vampire party though, since I'm a Lost Boy of Rice's 1980s.
We know in our hearts that zombies are too stupid to take over (yes, even if they were able to run), so it's a safe dark fantasy for society's tasty little rotten brains to enjoyably scare themselves with.
But with vampires, or zombies, or any monster, it's what would you do in the face of the threat. As readers/viewers we constantly play that game, either being underwhelmed by what dolts the characters are (i.e. many of Stephen King's Mainers), in agreement with, or at best, surprised & astounded by their monster coping adaptations, and Justin Cronin's The Twelve delivers the survival scenario in deadliest spades, never insulting us with simpletons but gifting us people who can deal not only with an irreparably fractured nation but with a harder version of humanity.
 |
| [Mas Gothic UK cover.] |
A sequel to 2010's runaway bestseller The Passage, the setting/voice/tone's 99% existential survivalism. The world doesn't give a fuck & it'll turn on your irrelevant sense of self-importance like an angry dog the moment you even think about looking in the mirror too long. And when your reflection does bare teeth, it unfolds like a slow motion nightmare where the dread of inevitable disaster is coming, the description stretching taut until the final whiplash moment of consequence. Hive-minded insectlike vampires über alles, with rather unhappy & small enclaves of dispossessed humanity just sustaining, and never really able to honestly hope in the face of abject terror.
Opposed to that existentialism, the other 1% hints at an unstated intuitive connective tissue that happens in life's exceptional moments: "At the wheel of the Redbird, Danny Chayes was experiencing, for the first time in his life, an emotion that could only be described as a magnificent wholeness of self. It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes." As with magick/seiðr, or active meditation, there's perceptive empowerment, transcendental, but not in the dwarfing in the face of nature way, more in the Kabbalistic godding way, as if the desperate times evoke & evolve in us exceptional self-measures, as per Colin Wilson's thesis in The Occult.
Cronin comes dangerously close with mentally disabled Chayes & victim/victimizer Lawrence Grey to King's Trashcan Man, using the trope of the ancient child/Boo Radley figure, and moreso in this sequel are there moments where one compares with The Stand, and some structure of Yvonne Navarro's far lesser known Afterage (1993). While this book wouldn't have been buildable without King's diseased decimating whimper end scenario from 1978, Cronin surpasses that ploddingly slow gathering with intelligent characters, breathtaking fear, and far grimmer circumstances. The absence of humanity and decay are prevalent in both.
In the face of apocalypse all the mundane details that daily living leave gain sweetly tragic gravity: "They backtracked into the heart of the little town. All the lights were out, the streets empty. They came to the school, a modern-looking structure set back from the road at the edge of the fields. A marquee-style sign at the edge of the parking area read, in bold letters: GO LIONS! HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!" America, R.I.P. School's out forever, indeed.
As a first installment The Passage completely shocks us with a new scenario and unguessable progression throughout, but The Twelve shows us different aspects of the aftermath and what gets cobbled together in greater swaths than its predecessor. One could probably get away with not reading The Passage and just read The Twelve as Cronin goes back to the outbreak and sets up the vampire dominant situation again, but you'd be compelled to go back and read The Passage too.
One moment where Cronin does totally cheese out though is at a stadium. We're told that something really, really, really³ bad's happened there, but we never actually get to see it. Implication's far from enough in this instance, and whether the author thought he might alienate his audience, or felt that he might be playing too much horror too early in the story, I'm unsure of, but the lack of delivery at that moment was sharply, sharply, sharply³ unsatisfying.
Far outnumbering that are the many, many, many³ moments of solid writing & craft, such as this "waiting" paragraph that's so pure gold: "He waited for orders; he waited for chow; he waited for the latrine. He waited for the weather to break, and when it didn't, he waited some more. Orders, weapons, supplies, news -- all were things he waited for. For days and weeks and sometimes even months he waited, as if his time on earth had been consecrated to the very act of waiting, as if he were a man-sized waiting machine."
"He was waiting now." Ha!
Also smart stylewise, Cronin slips effortlessly at the right moments into King Jamesian language to heighten the sense of circumstance & climax. We are reading an account of the apocalypse, like the Book of Revelation, or a doom-poem Ragnarok, our future itself set down for us to gawp at, and at certain junctures Homeric epithets get prefixed & suffixed to names, and destinies are nailed to flesh, and made heroic or tragic. Plus the inverted parallel between the original apostles that spread the word & miracle, and the 12 original vampires of the title suits this choice.
Cronin may be an NFL fan since the end sequence resembles a football game, but more like the Mesoamerican ballgame, the stakes are life & death, and results possibly world altering. The main antagonists are built up in both novels, but here we still don't get enough exploration of them before that climax, which in a third person book like this could've been presented, but wasn't. In contrast of the Ricean literary innovation of personalizing the vampire that we've gotten to unlive vicariously though, there isn't too much given here on our fanged overlords, but I suspect that may await us in the third book.
And the rules for Cronin's insectoid vampires are both familiar & shudderingly different. Remember the first time you read Mark Rein·Hagen's adaptations for VtM? There's something of that in here, a rooting of the Underworld franchise's science with preternatural manifestations of Stokerian ideas, which give us something fresh to consider in a subgenre rife with imitation.
The Passage Trilogy completes with 2015's The City of Mirrors. I'm hoping for a far future narrative jump. You've taken us so far afield Mr. Cronin, into the glimmering midnight that tests our ability to endure as a species, and makes us wonder if we each have what it takes inside to live until tomorrow.
 |
| [enter The Passage.] |
# # #
While a
mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena
IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for
employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan,
airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a
craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally
interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
