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Fear the Dark says the front cover of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, the sequel to his really quite popular The Passage which I read and reviewed last year. Reading that old review it was pretty clear that I expected to plunge into the newer novel quite soon but after Christmas but I got diverted as I often do by new bright and shiny things so here we are in August and I’m only getting around to writing about it now having read it a few weeks ago.

I also notice from that older review that I had picked up some mixed vibes about The Twelve, and perhaps that’s why I put off reading it, but never fear I have got there in the end and there is something to be said for reading dark horror on very warm and sunny summer days.

So The Twelve is  bit timey-wimey in as much as it takes as back to the events of the original novel as seen by a different group of characters all so that a rather nasty villain can receive a proper set-up before h forges on to create havoc in world fully of vampirey things. Most of the (not exactly) flashbacks are designed to give us a more detailed back story for characters old and new so that the big climax (and it is really quite a big one) will have the appropriate amount of oomph. There was at least one person i didn’t expect to be there at all and although i was pleased to see that person (despite what they were going through) it did kind of undercut the “what just happened there?!) last couple of paragraphs of The Passage.

It’s not as compelling as the first novel but I still enjoyed it a great deal, reading it in huge page-turning chunks. There’s a nice set up for the last book in the trilogy although I’ve no idea when that’s coming out.

So pretty cool all in all.