Book review: The Passage
Oct. 22nd, 2010 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
next_to_normalThis is another one that I requested from the library a long time ago, so I don't remember where I heard about it. But man, was it worth the wait. (Haha, Freudian slip - I accidentally wrote "weight," and at 766 pages in hardback, this one is a doozy. I actually put it on the scale, and it weighs in at 2 lbs. Not the easiest for bus/train reading, but I couldn't put it down.)
The Passage, by Justin Cronin
Deep in the Colorado mountains, the U.S. government is conducting top secret experiments involving a virus found in bats in the Bolivian jungle that may hold the key to eternal life. But the test subjects - all death-row inmates with nothing to lose and no one to miss them - have developed some unusual characteristics: supernatural strength and speed, razor sharp teeth and claws, extreme sensitivity to light, and a thirst for blood. No one wants to use the term vampires, though, because, as one character says, "vampires were just something in a made-up story, nice-looking men in suits and capes with good manners, and this here's real." Forget Dracula, Anne Rice, and Twilight. These are brutal, ruthless killers devoid of all humanity. They are animalistic, but don't make the mistake of thinking they're pure instinct. They can reason and plan and coordinate, and underestimating them leads to disaster.
The unthinkable happens, of course, and the test subjects escape. Within days, the United States has been overrun, the government has collapsed, and foreign countries are preparing to use nuclear weapons to stop the spread of the virus any way they can. The Army is burning its own cities to contain the outbreak, and trains full of children are being evacuated to secure military facilities as civilization crumbles.
Nearly a hundred years later, all of North America has been taken over by the virals, and no one knows if the outside world even exists anymore. A small group of survivors, descendants of the evacuated children, attempts to eke out a somewhat primitive existence and build a new civilization within their walled compound, protected by the bright lights that keep away the darkness and the virals. But with their power source failing and no sign of the Army in decades, it seems their days are numbered. Until one day a girl named Amy arrives - appearing only fourteen, but having lived a hundred years, she is the only successful product of the government's experiments, and she may hold the key to defeating the virals once and for all. And so a tiny band of believers must set out on a long, dangerous journey back to the place where it all started.
If you didn't know this, post-apocalyptic dystopian future stories are kind of a kink of mine, so I absolutely LOVED the premise. It's kind of like a weird hybrid of Jurassic Park and The Stand. The first third of the book sets the stage for the apocalypse, and there's a definite feeling of all the pieces falling into place. But there are also some fantastic characters, and I have to admit, I was sorry to leave them behind when the book jumped forward in the future. It took a bit longer to warm up to the second generation of characters, but once I did, I was completely sucked into the story of their survival and their epic journey. It is fascinating to see the way that their civilization has developed, now that hardly anyone is alive who remembers what life was like in the Time Before - most of them have never even seen the stars, and they understand little of contemporary society and culture.
I also love that the vampires - referred to alternately as virals, glowsticks, jumps, smokes, and dracs - are seriously terrifying creatures. If you're sick of the current trend of defanging vampires, then this is like the anti-Twilight. There's actually very little romance in the book at all. There are relationships, of course (producing children being necessary for the continued existence of the human race), but they take a firm backseat to the action and the mystery.
This is definitely the kind of book you'd call a page-turner. It's not non-stop action by any means, but the characters' very existence means they're in constant peril, and so even a quiet conversation is fraught with "OMG what will happen next" anticipation. The author also intersperses the narrative with journal entries, legal documents, and maps, which helps to ground the world-building in "facts" and hints that civilization does, in fact, live on (though the intriguing note that the documents were preserved by the "Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts" makes one wonder whether those studying them 1,000 years in the future are even human themselves).
One thing that felt like a cop-out is that the author LOVES cliffhangers, and multiple times uses a fake-out where someone is facing certain death, only for the reader to discover later on that he or she survived. Once or twice wouldn't be bad, and some of them make sense in retrospect, but it's definitely overused. (To give him credit, though, he's not shy about killing people permanently. The body count is incredibly high.) It's particularly frustrating when no explanation is given for HOW they survived, and it's a mystery even to the characters themselves. Apparently, though, this is just the first in a trilogy, so perhaps some of those loose ends will be addressed in the next two books (due out in the next couple years).
I didn't realize it was a trilogy until after I read it, which makes the "WTF? You can't end it THERE!" ending a lot more understandable in context. But be warned that although there is definitely a specific arc that gets resolved and feels like a complete story, you'll be left wondering about a fair amount of things, and the ending is a total cliffhanger.
That said, though, I think I'd still recommend reading it now, rather than waiting for the whole trilogy to come out (I know some people don't like to be left hanging that long). It's a brilliant, moving, utterly compelling story from page 1, and... okay, I also want you to read to because I'd like other people to discuss it with. :)
The Passage, by Justin Cronin
Deep in the Colorado mountains, the U.S. government is conducting top secret experiments involving a virus found in bats in the Bolivian jungle that may hold the key to eternal life. But the test subjects - all death-row inmates with nothing to lose and no one to miss them - have developed some unusual characteristics: supernatural strength and speed, razor sharp teeth and claws, extreme sensitivity to light, and a thirst for blood. No one wants to use the term vampires, though, because, as one character says, "vampires were just something in a made-up story, nice-looking men in suits and capes with good manners, and this here's real." Forget Dracula, Anne Rice, and Twilight. These are brutal, ruthless killers devoid of all humanity. They are animalistic, but don't make the mistake of thinking they're pure instinct. They can reason and plan and coordinate, and underestimating them leads to disaster.
The unthinkable happens, of course, and the test subjects escape. Within days, the United States has been overrun, the government has collapsed, and foreign countries are preparing to use nuclear weapons to stop the spread of the virus any way they can. The Army is burning its own cities to contain the outbreak, and trains full of children are being evacuated to secure military facilities as civilization crumbles.
Nearly a hundred years later, all of North America has been taken over by the virals, and no one knows if the outside world even exists anymore. A small group of survivors, descendants of the evacuated children, attempts to eke out a somewhat primitive existence and build a new civilization within their walled compound, protected by the bright lights that keep away the darkness and the virals. But with their power source failing and no sign of the Army in decades, it seems their days are numbered. Until one day a girl named Amy arrives - appearing only fourteen, but having lived a hundred years, she is the only successful product of the government's experiments, and she may hold the key to defeating the virals once and for all. And so a tiny band of believers must set out on a long, dangerous journey back to the place where it all started.
If you didn't know this, post-apocalyptic dystopian future stories are kind of a kink of mine, so I absolutely LOVED the premise. It's kind of like a weird hybrid of Jurassic Park and The Stand. The first third of the book sets the stage for the apocalypse, and there's a definite feeling of all the pieces falling into place. But there are also some fantastic characters, and I have to admit, I was sorry to leave them behind when the book jumped forward in the future. It took a bit longer to warm up to the second generation of characters, but once I did, I was completely sucked into the story of their survival and their epic journey. It is fascinating to see the way that their civilization has developed, now that hardly anyone is alive who remembers what life was like in the Time Before - most of them have never even seen the stars, and they understand little of contemporary society and culture.
I also love that the vampires - referred to alternately as virals, glowsticks, jumps, smokes, and dracs - are seriously terrifying creatures. If you're sick of the current trend of defanging vampires, then this is like the anti-Twilight. There's actually very little romance in the book at all. There are relationships, of course (producing children being necessary for the continued existence of the human race), but they take a firm backseat to the action and the mystery.
This is definitely the kind of book you'd call a page-turner. It's not non-stop action by any means, but the characters' very existence means they're in constant peril, and so even a quiet conversation is fraught with "OMG what will happen next" anticipation. The author also intersperses the narrative with journal entries, legal documents, and maps, which helps to ground the world-building in "facts" and hints that civilization does, in fact, live on (though the intriguing note that the documents were preserved by the "Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts" makes one wonder whether those studying them 1,000 years in the future are even human themselves).
One thing that felt like a cop-out is that the author LOVES cliffhangers, and multiple times uses a fake-out where someone is facing certain death, only for the reader to discover later on that he or she survived. Once or twice wouldn't be bad, and some of them make sense in retrospect, but it's definitely overused. (To give him credit, though, he's not shy about killing people permanently. The body count is incredibly high.) It's particularly frustrating when no explanation is given for HOW they survived, and it's a mystery even to the characters themselves. Apparently, though, this is just the first in a trilogy, so perhaps some of those loose ends will be addressed in the next two books (due out in the next couple years).
I didn't realize it was a trilogy until after I read it, which makes the "WTF? You can't end it THERE!" ending a lot more understandable in context. But be warned that although there is definitely a specific arc that gets resolved and feels like a complete story, you'll be left wondering about a fair amount of things, and the ending is a total cliffhanger.
That said, though, I think I'd still recommend reading it now, rather than waiting for the whole trilogy to come out (I know some people don't like to be left hanging that long). It's a brilliant, moving, utterly compelling story from page 1, and... okay, I also want you to read to because I'd like other people to discuss it with. :)
