'The Passage' by Justin Cronin
'The Passage' by Justin Cronin

The good

  • Interesting premise: vampirism as a viral disease.

  • Some interesting characters.

  • Occasionally lovely writing and some beautiful scenes of humanity in a post apocalyptic world.

The not so good

  • Way too long.

  • The book starts out with seemingly-scientific elements (with vampirism as a disease), but then tosses in 100% pure magic: characters who can predict the future, characters who work in omens and prophecies, and characters who can read or even control minds. Every one of the elements is completely unnecessary for the story, and in many ways, makes the story worse (“deus ex machina”).

  • The plot structure is a hot mess. I suspect the author is a “discovery writer,” discovering the story organically by “following” the characters and seeing what they do, rather than trying to plan things out in advance (the “outliner”). This has the advantage of leading to endearing characters and some really interesting scenes, both of which this story has. But the drawback is that those individual pieces don’t necessarily form a coherent whole. The plot is really all over the place and the story seems to meander around. Many elements are set up earlier in the story but not really used or resolved later on. Given the length of the book, I was very tempted to give up multiple times. I only kept reading because there were just enough cool scenes scattered through out to keep me going… But it wasn’t a great experience overall.

Rating: 3 stars