Book review: The Passage by Justin Cronin

[Werthead]

The year is 2017. The USA is still embroiled in foreign military adventures, New Orleans has turned into a toxic wasteland and Blu-Ray has only just manged to become the dominant entertainment storage medium. A six-year-old girl, Amy Belafonte, is abandoned at a convent by her struggling mother. One of the nuns, Lacey, a former refugee from a war in Africa, realises that something is amiss with Amy, and that she is more than she first appears.

 

The United States government agrees. In the mountains of Colorado they have established Project Noah, an attempt to develop immortality ("So all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years,") using twelve death row inmates as guinea pigs. The final stage of the experiment requires the use of a young child, so the directors send FBI Agent Wolgast to collect Amy. But the experiment has gone catastrophically wrong, and whilst the first twelve experimental subjects have indeed become immortal, they have also become something else, something that cannot be contained.

 

Ninety years later, a teenage girl arrives out of the blue at one of the last bastions of civilised humanity in the world, a fortified town in California. Her arrival triggers a dangerous cross-country journey back to the source of the infection, and a series of revelations about the true nature of the threat they face, and how to combat it.

 

The Passage is still months away from publication, but is already a major success story. The publishing rights for the book and its two sequels were sold for $3.5 million, whilst the film rights were purchased by Ridley Scott's company for a cool $1.5 million for the first book by itself. Based on the book, this is understandable: I have rarely read a book that screams "Blockbuster hit!" as loudly as The Passage. Unusually, however, the book combines its mass commercial appeal with an impressive intelligence and a much stronger writing style than might be expected from a big horror novel (the Stephen King cover quote helps as well). The fact that the 'main' publishers rather than their SF&F imprints are publishing the book is also a sign that they are taking this book very seriously.

 

The Passage is an evocative novel that borrows and combines styles from other sources to terrific effect. The first third of the novel, in which the virus is released and civilisation falls, is reminiscent of the brilliant opening half of Stephen King's The Stand (although, unlike The Stand, Cronin doesn't badly fumble the ending). We then move ninety years further on to a world of crumbling freeways, unstable overpasses and weed-choked ruins which is much more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (albeit nowhere near as sparse). We then get some thrilling battle scenes between humans and 'virals' set in a shopping mall and the surrounding countryside which is much more in the vein of the Fallout computer games (and possibly Dawn of the Dead), whilst the idea of humanity cowering behind walls from the threat beyond recalls Carrie Ryan's recent novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth and its sequel. Yet the book never feels derivative, more playing with the tropes of the post-apocalyptic horror genre in interesting and original ways.

 

The novel has its own rhythm and cadence, based around rich descriptions of the environment and strong characterisation. The structure of the novel is also successful, with the first third forming an effective prologue to the remaining post-apocalyptic sequence. Initially this move appeared unwise, with Cronin abandoning the well-described situation and memorable characters of the opening of the book to start over from scratch, but the new situation and characters are just as effective, if not moreso (especially Alicia, a devastatingly effective viral hunter, and our main protagonist Peter). This does represent a shift in the pacing, with the first 250 pages rocketing by like a page-turning thriller, whilst the next sequence is more relaxed, but this is necessary to establish the new characters and situation. Then, once the journey into the unknown begins, the pacing and tension ratchet up again. In this latter sequence Cronin gives us a series of episodic adventures, such as the travellers stopping at another settlement built around a ruined prison where nothing is as it seems and a terror-filled journey across Las Vegas, which would make memorable horror novels by themselves, but here are merely smaller parts of a much greater whole.

 

The novel is but the first part of a trilogy, so whilst the book has definitive end-point and a series of compelling revelations about the setting and the world, there is also something of a cliffhanger ending which we will have to wait some time to see resolved (given it took the author over three years to write this first book, I assume the second is still a while off), which is just about the only negative thing about the book I can think of. Otherwise this is a page-turning, compulsive read.

 

The Passage (*****) is a superbly-written, well-paced and convincingly-characterised novel where the situation and characters remain in the imagination long after it is finished. This could be the start of something major indeed. The novel will be published on 8 June 2010 in the USA and on 24 June in the UK.

[Werthead]

The Twelve

 

The early years of the 22nd Century. North America is crawling with 'virals', creatures of superior strength and stamina who feed on human blood and flesh. Most are unintelligent, but they are controlled by 'the Twelve', the original death-row inmates who were experimented upon to create the virals. Standing against them is Amy, the Girl From Nowhere, and her allies, a military force based in Texas.

 

The death of one of the Twelve has also resulted in the destruction of the virals he created. This reveals the path to victory and survival: kill the Twelve and end the viral threat forever. But this is easier said than done. After five years of failed assassinations the military are ready to abandon the mission, and only one last attempt can be made.

 

With millions of copies sold, translations in forty languages published and the film rights bought for a very high amount, The Passage was one of the biggest success stories of 2010. The Twelve is the direct sequel and the middle volume of a proposed trilogy (the final volume, City of Mirrors, is due in 2014). However, Cronin has gone to some lengths to try to avoid 'middle volume syndrome' by giving the book a number of self-contained narratives and character arcs whilst also continuing the story of Peter, Alicia, Amy and the other survivors of the First Colony and their war against the Twelve.

 

The Twelve contains much of the same that made The Passage a good book: good characterisation, evocative descriptions and a rich atmosphere. It improves on it in several areas as well. It's a notably shorter (by some 200 pages), more concise and more focused book with every chapter building up to the conclusion. The Twelve does repeat The Passage's structure of having an opening section (in this case the first third of the novel) depicting the fall of civilisation before moving to the post-apocalyptic 'present day'. There are numerous self-contained stories in this section which are compelling reads, but initially appear a little disconnected from the post-apocalyptic storyline. However, Cronin eventually loops most of these storylines back to the main story and explains their relevance.

 

The biggest problem The Twelve faces, which is much more present than The Passage, is that of adhering to the traditional post-apocalyptic, 'big showdown' type of storyline whilst trying to surprise a reader familiar with the rules and tropes of such storylines. Now the rules of this particular type of vampire/zombie story have been set, Cronin shows a surprising inability to surprise or startle the reader any more. Things proceed pretty much as you might expect them to: some reversals, a few capture-and-escape sequences and then a big explosive finale (literally, with some huge explosions and shoot-outs) and something of a happy ending, until the inevitable final chapter which ends on a cliffhanger note leading into the final volume.

 

This predictability extends to the villains, with the rulers of the human/viral colony being rather rape-happy towards their prisoners. Whilst the issue isn't simply tossed in for the sake of it (as it would have been in, say, a Stephen King book) and is treated seriously, it's still a disappointing cliche to indulge in, especially as otherwise the treatment of the female characters is highly positive (three of the primary POVs - Alicia, Amy and Sara - are all female and are the most well-developed characters in the book).

 

The Twelve (****) is a very solid read, with Cronin's skills with character and prose being undiminished and even a tad improved from the first volume. However, the storyline is a lot more straightfoward, and the book shows a general decline towards predictability and cliche - though well-written - which is disappointing. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

[batcaver]

I read The Passage last year, and just reread it last month so I could begin The Twelve, which I'm a few pages into. I'm not sure if I'm going to finish at this point. I'm hoping that someone who has read it can tell me if it gets any better.

 

The Passage started pretty solid/standard for this kind of post-apocalyptic thriller, but it seemed like Cronin got really lazy during the last third of the book for some reason. I was into it during the pre-vampire apocalypse phase, and I thought the FIrst Colony section was by far the most original (though still not terribly so) and interesting part of the novel. I wasn't expecting anything great, but I was interested a bit because I'd heard that Cronin was more of a realist fiction writer playing off his normal court for this kind of story. I'd thought that because of that, it might be something a little different. Some of that does come through in places, but many elements seemed lifted directly from other popular works of this kind. It was most notably derivative of The Stand, by Stephen King, and I read that Cronin and his agent even made this comparison directly when pitching the book to publishers.

 

At times it did seem like Cronin could have slimmed things down in places, but being used to WOT his digressions didn't bother me so much. The characters were hardly deep, but they were more fleshed out than you usually get in this kind of thing. The "virals" had a well developed threatening presence, but it was squandered later in the novel when they become the typical battle-scene fodder, not squaring at all with the previous description of their lethal abilities. The character's up built by the initial two thirds lost most of their detail and dimension as we neared the end and the plot took some downright silly turns. Characters had started to fall into roles driven more by function than personality. For example, Maus is pregnant, Alicia is a soldier, Amy is the messiah, Michael fixes things, etc. Like I said, they exceeded this kind of thing before, but suddenly they're all diminished. Amy, the mystery girl and crux of the story, is probably the least interesting character in the book. She's almost completely devoid of substance and personality.

 

The religious imagery and symbolism had been pretty heavy handed throughout the novel, but as things near the end it becomes so dominant that I started to wonder if I was reading some volume of the Left Behind series. Let me be clear that this is not happening in the manner of, say The Exorcist or another typical horror story with biblical undertones. It's a totally different vibe. Several of the characters have begun to have conveniently timed but inexplicable clairvoyant visions, direct reference is made to the vampires being another flood sent by God to give the human race another beginning, Amy has started to talk to the vampires and the humans as if she was Jesus, and there's a lot more. Events are directly referred to as being "in the will of the Lord". The Twelve opens with a recap of the first book written as if it were a new gospel, but not in a creepy horror book kind of way. It's more of a "Praise the Lord!" kind of thing. I have no problem with religion, but I'd have liked to know what I was getting into before I started this. After all, if the vampires are all just God's will then there's not much mystery left in the story, is there?

 

I'd hugely appreciate anyone who has read it letting me know if the story gets any better. As I said, I was digging the stuff with the colony and the initial viral outbreak. Seems like things have taken a hard left now.

 

Edited to add - I forgot to mention that this book was sold for seven figure movie rights before it was even out. Putting that into perspective, I'm starting to think that this was more about writing a certain hit in the midst of the vampire craze for Cronin than anything else. That would square with the fact that most of the content is lifted from other, similar books. Who really just arbitrarily "finds themselves writing a vampire story" anyway at this point in time?