Book Log 2018 #7, #8 and #9: The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors

I'm not that into vampires, so this is not a trilogy I would have normally picked up. But after seeing a couple of friends rave about the series, I figured I'd pick it up.

OK, these aren't vampires as you'd classically describe them. They are the result of a government experiment to create super soldiers using a bat-borne virus found in South America. As with all such experiments, things go badly wrong, and the subjects escape. The effect on humanity is, also as you might expect, catastrophic.

The books themselves follow some of the humans who survive, including a man who was close friends with the "patient zero" vampire, and a girl whose own pre-vampire supernatural abilities may prove crucial to humanity's ultimate survival.

I didn't like these books as much as the friends who raved about it, though I did appreciate the scope of the story and the ways in which the author brought vampire lore into the present (and near future). My one big problem with the series comes in the last book, where we get the crucial insight as to why that "patient zero" vampire caused the de facto downfall of humanity, and it's underwhelming. I suppose you can say it's a textbook case of the banality of evil.  Still, there's a lot of well-paced story before this, and it's worth a read if this is the sort of thing that interests you.