Book review: 'The Twelve'

Book: The Twelve
Author: Justin Cronin
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 576
Price: Rs695

Vampire fiction has been sucked dry, almost. If John William Polidori drew first blood, as it were, with The Vampyre (1819), nearly two centuries later, Stephenie Meyer has carried out a transfusion of sorts, draining out whatever blood remained in the genre, and replacing it with a saccharine cocktail of hot chocolate and cough syrup.

The dilution of vampire fiction’s horror component has been accompanied by the genre’s rising popularity in global mass culture. Innumerable TV series and Hollywood adaptations have cashed in on the insatiable appeal the ‘immortals’ seem to hold for mortal consumers.

And there are countless websites peddling anything from custom-made vampire tattoos to vampire baby pacifiers to retractable fangs (I ordered a pair last month).

Into this expanding pool of dangerously diabetic blood jumps a middle-aged professor of literature named Justin Cronin. And you suddenly find, perhaps for the first time since Bram Stoker, fresh blood of literary vintage flowing into the ossifying veins of the genre. The effect is as dazzling, and as deadly, as daylight would be for a  ‘nightwalker’.

It is by now well-known that Cronin began penning The Passage trilogy on a dare from his eight-year-old daughter, who wanted him to write a book about a little girl who saves the world. But for the world to be saved, it must first teeter on the verge of destruction, and that is what happens in the first installment of the trilogy, The Passage, which came out in 2010.

A semi-autonomous wing of the American defence establishment, in its quest for the super-soldier, infects a bunch of criminals with a new virus, and as you’d expect, things go out of control. The twelve original test subjects escape from the high security facility, infect the population, and soon the entire continent is overrun by ‘virals’ — a hybrid monster with both vampire and zombie characteristics. As America descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, a few isolated settlements attempt to start life from scratch in walled, militarized colonies. A small band of humans attempts to fight back, and towards the end of The Passage, one of the all-powerful Twelve is destroyed, but so are two big human settlements.

In The Twelve, part two of the trilogy, Cronin takes us back to Year Zero, when the ‘outbreak’ happened, and fills the missing plot links between the original cast of characters and the bunch waging the battle a hundred years later. He also takes the story up a notch, getting new villains, adding layers to the old characters, and fleshing out the human dilemmas of living in a world where the old value systems no longer seem adequate for negotiating the slippery terrain where you have to choose between surviving as a monster and dying as a human being. A choice that, for many people today, would not appear unusual at all.

Anne Rice, in her Vampire Chronicles, reinvented the vampire as a metaphor for the ‘outsider’ struggling to find his bearings in a (human) society that has changed enormously from what it was when they were born, and changed faster than they could adapt to or understand.

Cronin explores the same predicament from the other side: how do you live when ‘being human’ renders you an outsider in a society controlled by a human bureaucracy that has made peace with the vampires, where the 99% lives and works as slaves of the quasi-vampiric elite, and the merest sign of resistance could have you branded a ‘terrorist’, turning you instantly into vampire food.

The Twelve opens in high epic mode, with the events of The Passage summarised in biblical prose. The story of an apocalypse survived is necessarily also the story of a new beginning — the story of genesis. And Cronin manages to chart, with painstaking attention to detail, the fears, motivations and inner conflicts of ordinary human beings who end up getting portrayed as legends and heroes by the historical imagination a thousand years later — without ever aspiring to heroism or seeming heroic in their own eyes.

The depth of Cronin’s characterisation is such that despite it being ‘only’ genre fiction, each of Cronin’s central characters — Amy, Peter, Alicia, Sara, Wolgast, Bernard — is worthy of a novel to himself or herself. Also, while the apocalypse is not a new element in vampire fiction — Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s recent Strain trilogy is also based on a vampire apocalypse caused by a virus — the imaginative recreation of a dystopian society surviving under perennial threat of vampiric invasion has never been achieved with the realism and panache that Cronin manages.

Cronin has set such high standards with the first two books that you can barely wait to sink your fangs into the final (and one hopes, equally fat) installment of the trilogy.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi.