The passage : a novel (edition 2011)

I agree with the reviewer who said: Beginning: Sad, Middle: Slow, End: Wow. It took me the better part of 4 months to work my way through this book and wow, oh wow, the end was worth the effort. I originally hadn't planned to read the next book in the series, but now I'm actually looking forward to it! ( )

Beginning = sad. Middle = slow. Ending = wow.

The pacing was a little back and forth... It didn't help that about 1/3 of the way through we get a whole new set of characters. Just when I was starting to feel really bonded to the characters we meet in the beginning, now you take them away and I have to start over with new people? Lame. But despite all of that, when it was good... It was damn good. And that's saying a lot coming from me, I don't like vampire stories. Hate hate hate vampires. Oh I'm a big scary vampire, I vant to suck your blood and seduce you and shit.. Please.

Back on topic.. The Passage. 4 stars. It could have been 5 if not for the stints of boredom I had to push through now and then in order to get to the end. And speaking of the end.. Oh the end. The last 20% or so it was un-put-down-able. So awesome. I'll definitely be reading the sequel whenever it happens to be released.. I have to see what happens next! Good stuff. I'll leave it at that. ( )

[The Passage], the first in a series of books by Justin Cronin, is one of those epic and sprawling stories that is a comfort to settle into; one that seems like it may never finish, may go on and on and never cause you to be tired of it. It is a book where the author seems to have settled in with you, taken time to flesh everything out, follow every rabbit trail, describe every sense and every emotion in every setting. The spell allows a reader to completely forget the outside world and step into another, making friends of the characters, tasting and smelling and feeling what they do. But few authors are capable of casting that spell; and even fewer editors or book publishing houses are apt to allow an author to conjure such a spell, shooting instead for the comfort that comes of predictability and reading bytes – or bites, either word fits here.

[The Passage] starts with a virus discovered in the deep reaches of a tropical jungle by a scientist. The set-up sounds like any number of other thriller books or movies that have been churned out since 1980. But Cronin distinguishes himself and his story by taking the time to tell a whole story, instead of just writing one of those books that seems like the jacket copy or screenplay was written first and then sent to some hack to fill in. The scientist, James Lear, is distraught from the recent death of his wife from cancer and he hopes to cure the disease and any other that could take a loved one away before their time. He enlists the help of the military, always a sign of trouble to come. But again, Cronin distinguishes his story in the details, focusing on another lost soul, FBI Special Agent Wolgast, who is asked to convince 12 death row inmates to be the first test subjects of the virus. Wolgast’s pain and hopelessness ooze off the page. After Wolgast has succeeded, he is then asked to bring Amy, a six year old girl abandoned by her mother at a convent, to the secret Colorado complex where the virus is being tested. Soon after Wolgast arrives with Amy, the experiment goes awry, as was its destiny, and all 13 test subjects are released into the world. The world collapses into chaos, destruction, and death – the test subjects feeding on and infecting the rest of the country.

This by itself was a full book, a complete story, if a little dark and unhappy. But for Cronin, the first 300 pages was just the prologue. For the next 600 pages tell the story of the world that emerged from the chaos and destruction – a small compound of about 100 souls, protected each night from the ‘virals’ by walls and nets and lights, exiting outside of time and outside of any hope that life has continued elsewhere. Peter Jaxson, one of the young men of the compound, encounters Amy on a patrol outside the walls. Amy, now a 100 year old adolescent, follows Peter back to the village, and the ‘virals’ follow her. Peter and his friends let Amy into their world but death follows her, and the small civilization is again thrown into chaos. Peter and his friends discover some of what Amy is and decide to leave their safe haven for the site of Amy’s quickening, Colorado. On their journey, they discover that other pockets of human life have survived, though not all are hospitable.

None of this description of the Cronin’s story does it any justice, as the real beauty is in the unhurried and indulgent manner in which Cronin tells the story. Few authors take their time this way – recently, I’ve read Wallace Stegner’s [Angle of Repose] and there is any number of Stephen King books, including [The Stand], which Cronin’s book is often compared. If there is a comparison between King’s [The Stand] and Cronin’s [The Passage], it has to exist on a level besides the obvious – a virus causes the country to collapse and a new dystopian way of life emerges. It has to exist in comparing these author’s inclination to take their time, to draw the story out and tell all of it, every detail. No one will begrudge Cronin’s descriptions of place and time and feeling once they’ve given the story a hearing. And no one will begrudge him the time and effort in examining every detail of each character’s life, because they all are us – they are all the people we recognize in our lives every day.

Bottom Line: Epic story-telling – unhurried and indulgent in a way that comforts the reader, transports them to another place to commune.

4 1/2 bones!!!!! ( )

This was a challenging book for me to get through and not because it is almost 800 pages. It is not the type of book that I would normally pick up, and I found myself intrigued and confused all at the same time during most of the book...

I recommend reading it, as it does leave you with that sense of "wow", that not all books can achieve. I will grab the next two in the trilogy, as it now holds my curiosity and desire to know more about the characters.
( )

I like vampire books and had heard good things about this one so I had high hopes. Maybe that was the problem. I should have gone in blind. But I still don't think I would have loved this one. If you are going to have a book this long and expect people to come back for more it better be really good. And I just don't think it was good enough to carry all that length. There were some characters that I really liked (most of who died on me) and then some I really didn't even find interesting. There were parts of the plot that were great and then some odd little things that were thrown in there that didn't make sense and just seemed to muddle things and then were never cleared up. There were parts that made me want to keep reading when I should be sleeping and others that put me to sleep. On the whole the book was just okay. But it was slow and long and if I am going to invest this much of my time in a book I want it to be better than okay. ( )