dividing The Twelve.

Society embraces different monsters as it needs them.

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.]

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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+.

Underworld is the Star Wars of vampire movies.

"Underworld" surpasses the idea of the creature feature. It personalizes the horror the way Anne Rice did, additionally throwing it back out into a greater context of conflicts. It's not just "Dracula vs the Wolf-Man", an indefatigable will slugging it out against uncontrollable beast -- it's an implication that these forces secretly dictate the workings of man. Michael Corvin's journey is the discovery of the darkness that underlies the mundane. And despite his every noble intention to practice medicine and save lives, the dark is in his blood and it's in our blood. This uneasy truth is what makes the film important & significant.

As primary example the first film gives its viewers Selene, a vampire warrior, a monster you root for and identify with. "Hunt them down and kill them off, one by one," Selene states as her joy. "I lived for it." Selene's accepted her darkness, using its inherent strength for a centuries long crusade of vengeance, and the virtue of that darkness attracts Michael. Corvin could instead turn his interest to the girl he helped save from the subway shootout, but the obsidian shadow he detects in himself, and in the nature of the world, appeals to him more.

While this edgy theme's the most insightful reason a studio-backed small budget film of $27 million unexpectedly garnered so much commercial success that it was re-issued in a sexy slipcased double DVD Unrated Extended Cut, there was quite alot more to it than that.

There's the litigation framing the picture to consider: White Wolf, makers of a roleplaying game wherein vampires & werewolves also happen to be bitter enemies, sues media giant Sony Pictures -- a losing battle. What the RPGers in Stone Mountain, Georgia, later forgot as the money kept rolling in over 13 prolific years was that they too built upon the mythic edifices which came before them: Augustine Calmet, Montague Summers, Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Whitley Streiber, Marv Wolfman, and of course Anne Rice. Director Len Wiseman denies he & his co-writers had any familiarity with the game, which is a legally safe answer (as legally safe as White Wolf stating their gaming books had no bearing on the vampiric murders committed by Roderick Ferrell in 1996). But even if writers Wiseman, Kevin Grevioux & Danny McBride had read the RPG sourcebooks, they took the archetypes and made them their own, exactly as all their predecessors had done, which is why there's a common set of similarities. The major divergence is the scientific: that both vampirism & lycanthropy spread from a mutagenic virus that only a small percentage of victims are susceptible to, cleverly accounting for why the mortal population hasn't been converted in epidemic proportions, and also why the urban decay endemic to the setting's ever present.

Plus, there's all the offscreen drama within the drama. Kate Beckinsale, respected for her roles in historical films, works against type by signing on to "Underworld" along with her longtime live-in boyfriend & father of her child Michael Sheen, who plays Lucian. While acting together might seem designed to ensure domestic tranquillity, during filming Kate and director Len Wiseman connect, and the British tabloids have a field day with the triangle as Kate relocates to LA to begin a new life with her new man. All this tension must have been channeled into the performances. When Lucian chases Selene's car, catches up to it, and punctures the roof with his sword to bury it in her shoulder, perhaps we're not just seeing a werewolf attack a vampire -- maybe we're witnessing a former lover stab his ex-girlfriend with relish as well.

A few months ago while waking up to one neighbor's brood cavorting on their back porch, my first reaction while lying in bed was to wish all the brats a painful loss of feet & tongues. "Hiss! Hiss!" a boy said. Then, "I'm a vampire!" And the girl also suddenly empowered said, "Now I'm a vampire too!" It made me want to go to Lown's and get all of them a pair of those cheap plastic fangs (but then I reconsidered as it might change their fearful impressions of me as the Goth next door). This mass influence, context & insight is why the 2003 "Underworld"'s achieved such cult status, meriting its hard-hitting 2006 sequel and this 2009's third medieval installment. Like the vampire, they will endure the test of time.

[Amelia, look out!]

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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+.