The Passage by Justin Cronin

Finished:  01/10/10

Genre: Horror/Science Fiction

Rated: B

Opening Sentence:    ‘…Before she became The Girl from Nowhere – The One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years – she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy…’

The story opens up with two main threads.  Set in the near future the first thread describes how U.S. government uses inmates on death row as guinea pigs to infect with a newly developed virus in order to create super soldiers.  As with all good science fiction something goes wrong and the result is 12 vampire-like creatures named virals – hairless, bat like creatures that glow in the dark and don’t like daylight – with incredible strength and the ability to move with such speed they can’t be seen.   The virals, predictably, escape and start their own recruitment by feeding on, and infecting humans.  The result is the end of human civilisation as we know it as the defence forces throw all their weapons into the fight, including nuclear, and fail.

The second thread is about a little girl named Amy, central to the whole plot she, for some unexplained reason, becomes the focus of the government weapons experiment; the agents who gather the guinea pigs are horrified that they have to kidnap a 6 year old girl but carry out their instructions anyway.  Amy is in the complex undergoing the treatment with the final version of the virus when all hell breaks loose.

Part two of the story is set around 90 years after the events that led up to ‘end of the world’.  A group known as ‘First Colony’ are living in the middle of a desert behind huge walls and protected by powerful lights at night to stop the virals entering.  A few in the colony realise that the power that runs the lights and keeps them safe is failing – the colony is in grave danger.  It is at this point that Amy shows up again and a small group sets off to find the source of a mysterious radio transmission that may be another group.

Was THE PASSAGE a great book?  Well, honestly, no – but it was a very good one, if a tad too long.  The first quarter of the book where the genesis of the virus is explained and then how it got out of control and escaped quarantine to result in the end of the world as we know it is quite tedious to read in places, and nearly had me on the point of putting the book down.  Once the second part commenced I was finally hooked and could not put the book down.  I like the way the story is told from a few sources both human and journal, it added to the reality of the difficulties of record keeping when our world is no longer as we know it.

There are lots of holes in the story, plots left hanging, which are obviously to be continued in subsequent books as THE PASSAGE is the first in a planned trilogy.

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