Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

Publisher:  Ballantine

Year:  2010

This is a barnburner of a book.  And the beginning of a trilogy I can’t wait to finish.  Did I just give away my enthusiasm for THE PASSAGE?  I guess I did.  Cronin comes off at times as a literary writer, which is what he is (see previous literary book:  THE SUMMER GUEST, Dial Press, 2003, see Googlebooks for more), and infused throughout this vampire book are characters that suffer deep thoughts, dwell on personal intrigues, and ready themselves for battle against vampire hordes ready to make them extinct; which is where the literary gives way to high drama, and impressive action; and sometimes horrifyingly plausible end of the world scenarios (if all the vampire tales around the world are true, that is) .

Throughout THE PASSAGE we follow the survivors of the vampire apocalypse, first an FBI agent and his extraordinary charge, a girl with a deep destiny.  The agent, Wolgast, acts as a surrogate father, his past (and possibly some other unknown, unseen thing) spurring him to protect a girl he was ordered to kidnap by the government for a secret experiment meant to give the U.S. Military dominance, but which dooms the world to a bleak future.  Through Wolgast and the girl (“Amy”), and their shared bond we get to see the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  Billions will die within years of an epidemic that no one is ready for, or can fight against.  And in the passage of just 100 years, the world has been pushed back into hut dwelling, pre-technological pockets of humanity who have learned to make, or fight, and in one instance, compromise their way into a life of desperation and living sometimes through a sheer force of will.  The scenes of devastation, horror, and the attempt to rebuild a stable society on small plots of land, are heart rending to read.  In a book about vampires, as expected, there’s a lot of death, and many of the dead include characters you started to care about.  But what else can you expect from war?  No one is safe; and though there’s a clear enemy, occasionally, I found myself feeling sorry for them.  Cronin is a deft writer at creating nuance, and making you consider things you may not have normally considered in such a tale and my sympathy for the vampires surprised me.

Cronin does a superb job of weaving vampire lore into his book, including the familiar vampire tropes of aversions to sun and garlic (even Dracula gets a mention); but more intriguing to me were the relationships that developed between survivors.  People hook up, plan futures, fall in love, make do, and have hope.  The day to day living, the need for food, the memories of people old enough to remember the past, or old enough to remember tales told to them about the past world ring true.  And at the end of this finely told tale, I literally gasped, and said, “No!” out loud when I realized that the last band of people in the book to reach as happy an existence as can be had at the end of the world still has me reeling and eager to read the next book…which comes out sometime next year, 2012.  Damn Cronin.

My review:  go read this book.