Justin Cronin's "The Passage"

I wasn't going to buy the book. I feel like I tell myself that almost every time I go to a reading and I have no money. I say, I'm not going to buy the book and I give myself a million reasons why--most of them having to do with a lack of finances. No offense Mr. Cronin but $27.00 is a lot these summer days when you've spent the last year as an adjunct. So, like I said, I wasn't going to buy the book, even though "Mary and O'Neill" is one of my favorites (still can't find my copy). Also, I wasn't going to buy the book because, don't we have enough vampire stories out there? So, I wasn't going to buy the book, but I'd go to the reading. I mean, that's free, my friends were going and I genuinely admire the author's work. So I went to the reading, in fact I planned a whole night around it. Reading, then drinks and dinner with the ladies.

It's always the damn readings that do me in. It was a good reading. So good that I bought the book. And then, I read the whole goddamn thing in two days. All 766 pages of it. And I was terrified and I was sad and I was like, wait a minute, I'm reading a vampire novel and I'm liking it. What?

Well, that's because it's not your typical vampire novel. "The Passage" is the first of a planned trilogy that will span 1000 years and will focus on, amongst other characters, a young girl named Amy Harper Bellafonte, also known as The Girl from Nowhere or the girl that lived 1000 years. So, what's different? This isn't a story that relies on mythology to tell a story about the undead. A science experiment goes wrong and the world changes irrevocably. This is a concept that's not so hard to believe in, is it? Mankind driven by it's own arrogance screws up the world (BP, I'm talking to you and your friends). Not really a shocker. It was also quite refreshing to read a science fiction piece that paid as much attention to the prose as it does to the action. There are times when things feel overwritten but there were also some really beautiful sections. The story itself moves fairly well with a few lags where I just wanted to thumb through and get to more interesting stuff. By more interesting, I meant the character development, the further development of this world that these character inhabited where it was the part of the novel that takes place in an America that might resemble ours in the next five to six years or the world that America becomes 92 years after the change. Perhaps there was a little too much on the side of these terrifying battles in the wilderness. But I'll give those to Mr. Cronin. It is after all, a vampire novel.