Received via PaperbackSwap.com

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Amazon Editorial Review

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

It took me a couple of weeks to read this mammoth apocalyptic novel. I've had this on my shelf since 2011 and thought I better get to it since I heard the third book of this trilogy, The City of Mirrors, will be published in May. I also have the second book, The Twelve, on my shelf but will probably hold off on it for a while to let The Passage settle in. Well, The Passage is one of those long novels in the Stephen King vein (i.e. The Stand) about a government inflicted apocalypse which appears to put an end to life on earth as we know it. In this case, the government is trying to produce a strain of vampire-like creatures that can be used as a weapon for war. Well of course this is a very bad idea! The first part of the novel details the events leading up to this catastrophe and then the novel jumps ahead 92 years to a group of survivors in California.

I really enjoyed the first part of the novel. The characters introduced were all well thought out and as I read, I really cared about what happened to them and where the novel was heading. This included Amy, a little girl who is wanted by the government in their experiments; FBI agent Wolgast, who is used to recruit death-row inmates for conversion; and Sister Lacey, who takes in Amy at her convent.

Then, after the inevitable release of the vampiric creatures, the novel jumps ahead to a group who have survived almost a hundred years in a fortified colony in the hills of California. This part of the novel reminded me a lot of the TV series, The Walking Dead, with the almost total destruction of humankind and a small group trying to survive. The novel goes on for several hundred pages with the group trying to find answers and a way to overcome their situation.

As mentioned, this is the first in a trilogy and I do want to read the remaining novels to see how this eventually turns out. Overall, I would recommend this but a lot of it seemed really familiar.

Heading to GoryDetails in NH...a wishlist tag. Good luck with this one and enjoy!

This doorstopper of a book arrived safely in today's mail; many thanks! I usually enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction; will see where this one lands on my all-time-favorites list!

Later: This book reminded me of a mix of The Stand and The Strain, with the addition of a major time-skip halfway through, after which we see what the world looks like a hundred years after the escape of the superpowered vampire-beings. Despite the many familiar elements, I found the story involving - though I admit that I preferred the first part of the story in its not-too-distant-future setting. The ethical turmoil of agent Wolgast (and, to a lesser extent, Doyle), the tormented pasts of nun Lacey, pedophile Grey, and the falsely-convicted, somewhat-simple-minded Carter, and the many little hints as to the way the world has changed - I found all these very intriguing, and I admit that when we hit the time-skip I was a bit disappointed not to find out what happened right after the escape of the Twelve. (I gather that the next book in the series will fill in some of those gaps, so may be I just need to be more patient!)

The post-time-skip world was so very, very different that it took a while for me to catch up with the new sets of characters. It did have a similar post-apocalyptic feel to The Walking Dead, though with scarily-fast vampire-things instead of plodding-but-inexorable zombies, and I appreciated the ways in which the society within the walls had changed to meet circumstances. (I didn't mind the asynchronous order, though at times I wished for more obvious clues as to just when a particular passage was written - for a while there I was clueing entirely on whether or not Theo was still with them {wry grin}.)

There were so many new characters (and a few surviving old ones - not for nothing did the book open with a line about Amy "who lived a thousand years") that I found it hard to get attached to any, and as so many of them met unfortunate fates that made it even tougher. By the end of the book I'd been on enough emotional ups and downs to wear myself out - and then the book ends on one of the most tragic notes of all, via a terse citation revealing where and when the last in-character text came from. It wasn't quite at the level of making me want to hurl the book across the room in sorrow and anger, but it came close! (Just as well I didn't try hurling it, as it's so heavy I'd have just hurt myself.)

I've heard that there's a film based on the book, though it's still in very-early-production stages. Modern CGI could certainly handle the necessary effects, but with so many characters and so much story I'm thinking it might work better as a mini-series...

[There's a TV Tropes page on the series.]

I left this book on a table inside Frederick's Pastries on this beautiful day. Hope the finder enjoys the book!

*** Released as part of the 2016 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***

I enjoy a good dystopian novel, and The Passage is well written and engaging. I am not a fan of vampires, so the fact that I finished this book is a testament to not only how well it is written, but to how Cronin is able to give the necessary details without going overboard with the gore. If you like vampire books, you should Ike this one. If you like dystopian novels, you will like this one. I give it an 8 because 9 and 10 are reserved for books I would read more than once. For me, The Passage was a good single read book.