Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Quite an Epic

The Passage by Justin Cronin

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Where to start? There so much that happens in this 800-page novel, which almost defies genre. Is it science fiction? Dystopian? Horror? Probably all of those, and more. The novel starts in the near future, or what was probably the near future at the time it was written over a decade ago. Humans have discovered a naturally-existing virus that, when it doesn’t kill them, essentially turns people into vampires: long-lived, strong, easily heal, don’t do well in sunlight, etc. As mankind is wont to do, […]

I am really happy I stuck with this trilogy.

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

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While my reviews of Cronin’s first two books in this trilogy, The Passage and The Twelve, were not the most favourable (more because of my personal taste than anything else), I am really happy I persisted through to the end of this 1000-year-spanning epic series. To recap, it follows the spread of a virus that jumps from animals to humans with such rapidity that Earth’s population is very nearly wiped out completely. Two ‘viral’ leaders emerge – Amy and Zero – in what ends up […]

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 […]



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