A review by kellyhager
The Passage Trilogy by Justin Cronin
5.0
I've wanted to read this since Stephen King made mention of it in his Entertainment Weekly column. And here's his blurb on the back of the book: “Every so often a novel-reader’s novel comes along: an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination. Summer is the perfect time for such books, and this year readers can enjoy the gift of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Read fifteen pages and you will find yourself captivated; read thirty and you will find yourself taken prisoner and reading late into the night. It has the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve. What else can I say? This: read this book and the ordinary world disappears.”
The synopsis:
“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.
As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.
With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction."
Me again.
Probably you're going to read a lot of comparisons to The Stand. (And it's understandable, seeing as how that's enough brick of a book about the end of the world and how the survivors fight the evil.) But I think it's more like The Stand meets Salem's Lot, and written in the style of The Historian. (Which is to say that it's beautifully written and you sort of float along on the words until you realize all of a sudden that you're incredibly creeped out because this book is about vampires. And not sparkly, vegetarian vampires, either. These vampires are mean. Incredibly mean. Oh-crap-Angel-just-lost-his-soul mean.)
This book ends on a cliffhanger (I believe it's going to be a trilogy, ultimately), so if you're not so good with the patience, you may want to wait until book 2 comes out. But there's not a release date for that, yet, and really, if you're not a patient person, you're probably not going to want to wait anyway. (Still, I warned you. CLIFFHANGER.)
The synopsis:
“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.
As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.
With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction."
Me again.
Probably you're going to read a lot of comparisons to The Stand. (And it's understandable, seeing as how that's enough brick of a book about the end of the world and how the survivors fight the evil.) But I think it's more like The Stand meets Salem's Lot, and written in the style of The Historian. (Which is to say that it's beautifully written and you sort of float along on the words until you realize all of a sudden that you're incredibly creeped out because this book is about vampires. And not sparkly, vegetarian vampires, either. These vampires are mean. Incredibly mean. Oh-crap-Angel-just-lost-his-soul mean.)
This book ends on a cliffhanger (I believe it's going to be a trilogy, ultimately), so if you're not so good with the patience, you may want to wait until book 2 comes out. But there's not a release date for that, yet, and really, if you're not a patient person, you're probably not going to want to wait anyway. (Still, I warned you. CLIFFHANGER.)