As previously mentioned, when reviewing The Passage, should you by any chance find yourself on a military appropriations committee faced with a proposal to create indestructible supersoldiers and, oh, by the way, we’re going to test this by splicing the genes of a strain of vampire bat to a bunch of death-row murderers, just say no. No ifs, no buts, no. Really, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that something is going to go terribly wrong and it does – but not for Justin Cronin. For the author, it’s all gone terribly right, earning him bestseller status and a very healthy bank balance.

Who’d have thought it? But then, who would have thought a self-published novel about sadomasochistic sex would turn into the publishing phenomenon of the last decade? At least Cronin can write much better than EL James – in fact, he generally manages to hide from the reader the basic ridiculousness of the premise, so that you buy into his post-vampire apocalypse world – I should know, I ploughed through the 800 plus pages of The Passage (with quite a lot of skipping but a genuine desire to find out what happened) and now I’ve gone on to read the sequel.

I’m pleased to say that the twelve of the title – the death-row killers turned vampire super monsters – are dealt with by the end. Whether I’ll go on to read the third and final (I think) volume in the series I’m not sure at the moment. But I probably will. It might be nonsense, but Cronin makes me want to know what happens next – and that is the defininition of story telling.