There are people who think I’m, like, totally into vampires. They’re wrong. Yes, I happen to like that one musical about dancing vampires. I like it a lot. But that has everything to do with the music. And, yes, Let the Right One In is the best movie I’ve seen in the last few years. Other than that, I can take ’em or leave ’em.
I can take Justin Cronin’s vampire apocalypse novel The Passage very well.
The Passage is the story of a government experiment gone terribly wrong. We’re talking mayor epic failure here. It’s the mother of all clusterfucks. Instead of the super soldiers they were supposed to become, the test subjects got turned into something different altogether: something hungry, deadly and nearly indestructible. And then they escape… Nearly a century later, a few survivors set out to see if they can set things right.
This is then the part where I try to make up my mind about this book. Yes, I enjoyed it. A lot. But no, it’s not a particularly great book. The Stand with vampires it’s not. So while it probably could have lost a few pages, while some of the plot lines were a bit meh and resolved to easily, while it asks you to suspend your disbelief quite a bit—even for an apocalyptic-biotech-vampire-sci-fi-thriller-epic-quest-to-save-whatever’s-left-of-mankind novel—and while it can’t always steer clear of the typical first part of a trilogy issues (lots of exposure, explanation and set up for the next parts), the writing was engrossing enough to make me not really care about all that. The Passage is good fun and very entertaining. And I’m kinda looking forward to part two, which will be called The Twelve and is due sometime in 2012.
- Book Read
- Justin Cronin — The Passage
- First Line
- 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.