When I first sat down to write this review, I didn’t quite know how to begin. Then I realized I was wrong; I know what to say because the author didn’t. It starts at the very beginning, where the prologue was written in the style of Genesis, as if it is the Word of God. It was just…poor. Bad idea; bad execution.
That is the overall theme as I read The Twelve. This book seems like the result of one or more of the following: an author who didn’t quite know what he wanted to do, an author who didn’t have a plan of how to get it done, and/or an author who didn’t have enough time to do exactly what he wanted. Yes, The Twelve reads like a novel done on deadline. The result is an unsatisfying story and bad writing (excruciating miraculousness?). The Twelve is a story of contrived coincidences, not-so-mysterious mysteries, and too many cases of knowing Person A will turn out to be Person B’s relative.
I didn’t think The Passage was a good book, but I did find it interesting. The premise and the overall plot were fine; it was in the details, the little things, that the book failed for me. The Twelve, on the other hand, was bad and boring. Going in, I was interested to learn what would happen. By the time I read 15% into the novel, I didn’t care anymore. That interest never came back. This is a novel about human resistance in a post-vampire apocalypse North America, yet there was very little tension. There was never a sense of real danger.
Wait, I take that back. There were a couple of times when you may have thought Amy might be in some serious danger until you realize that the opening sentence of The Passage is, “Before she became the Girl from Nowhere—the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years—she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.” At the time of The Twelve, Amy is barely a hundred, so there’s no suspense when it comes to whether or not she lives or dies. Yet, the author chose to treat the concept of Amy surviving as a major question.
This epitomizes another issue of The Twelve. It was written as if the expected readers either did not read or do not remember The Passage. There are quite a few characters, such as Lila and Vorhees, and Cruk, whose lives and backgrounds are explored in The Twelve whom I remember from The Passage. Their presence in the first novel eliminates some of the tension that would have otherwise been present while reading the backstories. By deduction, one must conclude that the backstories’ purpose is to provide insight into the overall storyline. I could get with that, however…
The backstories have three other major problems. First, they all deal with characters and/or plot points that are truthfully inconsequential. They aren’t treated that way in the novel, but they really are inconsequential. They seem larger in importance because of the disjointed and scrambled manner in which the novel is constructed. Characters like Lila and Grey and Guilder are unimportant. They play major roles in the plot, but the overall plot of this novel is dumb. It adds nothing to the individual story. It adds nothing to the trilogy as a whole. When considered in conjunction with the overall plot, these backstories make absolutely no sense.
Second, they often contradict what we read in The Passage in such a way that I need resolution. Otherwise, I’m left to believe the author was forgetful, careless, or clueless. For instance: I know that First Colony was populated with children who were transported by train from Philadelphia because the author wrote it in the first novel. This time, however, I read that a First Colony resident’s ancestor bypassed Philadelphia. If this is true, how did this resident’s ancestors end up in First Colony. There was no need for this contradiction, but it’s there and, therefore, should be explained. It is not. Like I wrote earlier, there seemed to be no plan. I’m not certain the author fully thought through his novel. Also, “all eyes” was a saying in First Colony. The first time it is uttered in this novel, it is spoken by a member of the Expeditionary who was never in First Colony. That’s sloppy writing.
Third, later text within the novel rendered them all unnecessary. The entire first 40% of the novel is told to us later on in several sentences. A writer should include one or the other; we shouldn’t have to read all the details early and then a synopsis later. We don’t need to read Book III, “The Field” because we learn everything we need to know about Dee Vorhees and her two daughters in conversation later. We don’t need to read all about Lila Kyle’s eccentricities—we learn all about them later. It’s too much, and it takes readers out of the novel (although, to be fair, I was never quite in The Twelve).
The Twelve did make me laugh, though. Unfortunately, I was laughing at the author instead of with him. These were due to instances where he addressed issues that I and others had with The Passage. One example is when he brought up the question of why death row inmates were chosen as the guinea pigs for something that would make them long-living super humans. In this, as in all the other cases, he neither answered nor resolved the issues.
Why was this novel called The Twelve? This book was about the Twelve as much as the Rocky movies were about Paulie. They are, like many things the author treated as important, largely inconsequential to the story. They should have been, but they were not. With the exception of two, Martinez and Carter, they were treated like a black box, a specter. They had no presence. They had no voice. And throughout the novel, the Twelve only did two things. The first was a smart decision by the author; the second was probably the dumbest thing about book.
SPOILER ALERT
First, the Twelve made a seemingly collective decision to shed some of their Many. Too many vampires would leave too few humans from when they could feed. Killing off some of the Many would allow the food supply to replenish. That was a very smart inclusion by the author.
The final act of the Twelve led to the novel’s climax. For some unexplained reason, they left their home regions to come live together in the structure Guilder built to house them. In The Passage we were told the Twelve went to their respective homes because they were comfortable there. In The Twelve, they all decide to move to Iowa because? If they were comfortable together, they would have already been together. They certainly wouldn’t need protection, especially not as provided by a relatively powerless individual like Guilder. And…and…and…they know what happened to Babcock. Why would create a situation in which they were all together in one place? Why would they all come together in a place that housed approximately 70,000 humans? It just makes them easier to kill. And since the plot was driving to their destruction, it was an easy way for the author to accomplish the feat. It was a cheap copout and more evidence that there was no plan. And when the Twelve did die, they did so without name and without specificity.
END SPOILER
In my review of The Passage I wrote the following:
Of everything that frustrated me in this novel, the structure is the most bothersome. The author chose to write this book in a manner such that the reader always knows the outcome prior to reading about the actual events. This is not to condemn the use of flashbacks; that’s not what happened here. No, a large number of the scenes within The Passage begin with an assessment of the characters’ situations (who’s alive, who’s dead, etc.) and then follows with how it all came to be. Scene by scene by scene of this. It’s a bit like watching Memento except with forward progression. Even the introductory sentences about the two major characters, Amy Bellafonte and Peter Jaxon, tell the reader that both will survive. The end result is the undermining of most of the tension that should exist in the story.It still applies. The Twelve exhibits a strong lack of preparation and setup. How else to describe a book that features a key scene in which an individual known to have been exposed to the vampire virus is housed in a governmental facility from which he is able to escape by simply walking out of the door?
I’m not sure there were any true character arcs. There was no maturing and very little progressing, and most of that took place off the page. Much of the characterization felt incomplete. Text describing Kittridge’s experiences, for instance, in war reminded me of The Becoming and The Remaining. That’s not a good thing. Yes, Amy had a quasi-arc. But so much of it takes place, again, off the page. Plus, the Amy of The Twelve is a vastly different Amy than the one from The Passage. This Amy is a little too ridiculous to take seriously. And the furthering of this pseudo-love triangle between her, Alicia, and Peter is comically bad.
In that aforementioned review, I also wrote, “The world-building was very good. The structure of First Colony, the politics, science, gender roles, and geography of the place were all well-thought out and very well conveyed.” That is not the case in this novel. The Twelve is a sociological nightmare. The author strikes me as one of those people who thinks he’s a champion in the fight against racism and sexism while being an actual racist and sexist. Racism exhibit A is Jamal, who is a stereotypical loud Black man who causes trouble and doesn’t get along with anybody. Racism exhibit B is Juan Sweeting, aka Ceps, whose “manners aren’t the best and his lips move when he reads, but he pretty much behaves himself as long s you don’t forget to feed him.”
He goes out of his way to identify individuals, usually woman, before describing them in such a way as to degrade them by feeding into disparaging stereotypes. Here are two examples:
The nurse, a young Hispanic woman, was penciling in a crossword puzzle.Far worse was the author’s description of Lore, who is to be assumed Latina because of her use of Spanish phrasing. “Her body was lean an dstrong, her hair, bleached by the sun, cut short. Attractive but in an unconventional, slightly masculine way, radiating a frank, even carnivorous sensuality.” Carnivorous sensuality? Yeah, he hit the stereotype jackpot in this book.
“My father needs his diaper changed.”
She didn’t look up. “They all need their diaper changed.” When Guilder didn’t move, her eyes darted upward from the page. They were very dark, and heavily lined. “I’ll tell someone.”
“Please do.”
At the door he stopped. The nurse had already resumed working on her puzzle.
She was dark-skinned and slim, with subtly Asiatic eyes, and young enough to be his daughter, though this was not the attraction—if anything, he would have preferred that she were older. He had originally found her through a service, but after a probationary period he had been permitted to call her directly. The first time, he had been as nervous as a college boy. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and he’d found himself worrying that he wouldn’t measure up—in hindsight, a preposterous concern. But the girl had quicly put him at ease, taking command of the occasion.
This novel calls to mind a guy who never had success with girls when he was younger and now harbors a deep-rooted hatred of women. The one bit of subtlety in The Twelve is the way the author excuses deviant abusive behavior by men (emphasis mine): “He’d been arrested twice, the first time for exposure, which he’d pled down to a misdemeanor, the second for aggravated sexual assault. Basically, he’d touched the kid—not exactly a hanging offense, but nothing nice, either.”
There are a high number of inappropriate relationships. The book is littered with men like “Last Stand in Denver” who are, at best, creepy. There’s one scene in which a teenage girls speaking to a grown man says, “Did I mention I was a virgin?” and ends with, “It was not a request that could be refused; nor did he want to.” Give me a break. These men are portrayed as heroic figures, yet many of them prey on girls. These are bad men. I’d hurt them before I let them get involved with my daughter or sister. Every interaction between Peter and Amy is inappropriate. Kittridge and April are disgusting. And you can see them all coming because the foreshadowing in this novel lacks subtlety and mystery.
From The Passage, we know that Anthony Carter is mentally disabled. We know he can barely read. And we know he was put on death row for trying to save a White woman who was trying, successfully, to commit suicide. In The Twelve, we discover that his Many are called “dopeys” because they are mentally disabled vampires. Seriously. We also discover that Carter has essentially devoted his undead life to making her realize how much he loves her. He also utters “Yes’m.”
Lila Kyle is a collection of just about every common stereotype about women. She’s pregnant and goes crazy, yet she can control men. Her maternal instinct rages out of control. She has no grasp on reality. She is, in the plot of this story, a bad guy. From my perspective, however, there is no practical difference between Lila in The Twelve and Brad Wolgast in The Passage. Wolgast is a hero, though. Right.
The author even found time to weigh in on the state of collegiate athletics. “One of those kinds of schools, Guilder thought—a sports franchise masquerading as a college where criminals drifted through phony courses and filled the coffers of the alumni fund by pounding their opposite numbers to pieces on autumn afternoons.” Yes, I know this is a character’s thoughts. Again, this has nothing to do with the plot or, because the audience for this book is not expected to coincide with those who care about college sports issues, establishing the character’s personality and mindset. It is stereotype-filled social commentary by the author.
Yet, it is clear that the author is no dummy. In describing the Homeland, he provides great commentary on slave societies and how they become self-perpetuating. He even included a traces of a house slave vs. field slave differential. Still, he messes it up with details. He planted seeds for a great storyline for Alicia and the torture she faces. Instead of exploring it, he shies away from it. It’s so frustrating.
The Twelve is a frustrating mess. It’s boring. It’s really, really bad. It is so bad that, at this point, I believe I will be skipping the final book of this trilogy.
D-
