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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
This is a good book for what is clearly a series. But therein lies the problem. It feels like a series. And most series are little more than writers with enabling editors IMHO. The author does a great job of character development, but there are so many characters to develop that by the time we get to the end of the book (and our patience) the quality falls apart in the wrapping up of the book. I would recommend the book, it's worth the effort. But don't expect to feel satisfied at the end.
Less about vampires and more about apocalyptic living. So if you like science-fiction and want to get engrossed I would pick this as a summer read.
Okay, guys, I just spent thirty-five hours of my life - thirty-five hours I will never ever ever get back - listening to this audiobook.
WHY WHY WHY DID I DO THAT??
A month or so ago, I was trolling around Audible, looking for a great value for my one-credit-a-month plan. The front page was advertising The Passage with great enthusiasm, and I like apocalypses as much as the next girl, so I bought it.
It started off well enough. The government is experimenting with a virus strain from vampire bats in Bolivia. They've reached the stage where they need human subjects and send a FBI agent named Wolgast to collect twelve death-row inmates. Each of the twelve are injected with the virus and morph into these creepy, human-esque creatures with glowing orange eyes and a taste for blood. They also possess incredible strength and are super difficult to kill. The army wants to use them as super weapons in the Middle East. GREAT IDEA, RIGHT, ARMY??
Basically, the Twelve break out because it turns out that they can sneak into weak-willed people's dreams, and start infecting people by the hundreds. This infection soon spreads across the entire continental US, decimating the population, and turning millions of individuals into virals as well. However, the reader is let in on a little secret - a six-year-old girl named Amy is the 13th subject to be infected, but she doesn't become a viral. She just develops a great complexion and long life and can sometimes read minds and shit.
THEN 100 YEARS PASS. WE HAVE TO ENDURE AN EPICALLY LONG JOURNAL ENTRY FROM AN OLD WOMAN RECALLING HOW HER PARENTS SAVED HER FROM THE VIRALS.
...And we're introduced to the First Colony in California, populated by characters that all blend in together and that you could hardly care about.
I think the protagonist was supposed to be Peter Jaxon, a young man who has, in a true cliched fashion, always lived in the shadows of his father and older brother. Peter is special because he's always felt that he's meant for ~*greater things*~. After what felt like years of Cronin discussing the First Colony and Peter's home life and the backgrounds of more or less every individual in the place, Peter meets Amy - who now resembles a teenager.
Blah blah blah, things happen and Peter, Amy, and his ragtag group of merry men decide they have to go to Colorado. Their resident whiz kid, Michael, discovers a radio broadcast that's been asking for Amy to be returned. PILGRIMAGE.
Cronin spends about a third of the book talking about the lives of minor characters. I think this was some idea of his that giving extraneous information would flesh out each individual, but uh, no. Perhaps instead of giving me the detailed history of Galen Strauss, he could have made me empathize more with Peter. Or Amy, for that matter. Instead Peter wanders through the desert, shooting virals and struggling with his inner thoughts and exclaiming the idiotic word "flyers!", while Amy mumbles cryptic phrases that confuses the shit out of everyone.
And seriously, flyers?! I don't know why Cornin didn't choose OLIVE OIL or PIG TESTICLES or MAGNETS. They might have sounded less stupid as profanity than flyers.
There's no doubt that Cronin sets up a dark and interesting premise for this story. The first part of this book is terrifying. And his prose is not bad, but perhaps too poetic and long-winded. Most of this reads like a cheap Hollywood blockbuster. Except boring. I cannot even understand how his editor didn't take a box cutter to half of what was written.
I spent most of the book trying to puzzle out how Cronin won a PEN/Hemingway award because trudging through the later half of this book was a trial. I can't believe there are two other monstrous volumes left in this trilogy. I'm torn between curiosity and absolute dread. I suppose I'll have to see.
WHY WHY WHY DID I DO THAT??
A month or so ago, I was trolling around Audible, looking for a great value for my one-credit-a-month plan. The front page was advertising The Passage with great enthusiasm, and I like apocalypses as much as the next girl, so I bought it.
It started off well enough. The government is experimenting with a virus strain from vampire bats in Bolivia. They've reached the stage where they need human subjects and send a FBI agent named Wolgast to collect twelve death-row inmates. Each of the twelve are injected with the virus and morph into these creepy, human-esque creatures with glowing orange eyes and a taste for blood. They also possess incredible strength and are super difficult to kill. The army wants to use them as super weapons in the Middle East. GREAT IDEA, RIGHT, ARMY??
Basically, the Twelve break out because it turns out that they can sneak into weak-willed people's dreams, and start infecting people by the hundreds. This infection soon spreads across the entire continental US, decimating the population, and turning millions of individuals into virals as well. However, the reader is let in on a little secret - a six-year-old girl named Amy is the 13th subject to be infected, but she doesn't become a viral. She just develops a great complexion and long life and can sometimes read minds and shit.
THEN 100 YEARS PASS. WE HAVE TO ENDURE AN EPICALLY LONG JOURNAL ENTRY FROM AN OLD WOMAN RECALLING HOW HER PARENTS SAVED HER FROM THE VIRALS.
...And we're introduced to the First Colony in California, populated by characters that all blend in together and that you could hardly care about.
I think the protagonist was supposed to be Peter Jaxon, a young man who has, in a true cliched fashion, always lived in the shadows of his father and older brother. Peter is special because he's always felt that he's meant for ~*greater things*~. After what felt like years of Cronin discussing the First Colony and Peter's home life and the backgrounds of more or less every individual in the place, Peter meets Amy - who now resembles a teenager.
Blah blah blah, things happen and Peter, Amy, and his ragtag group of merry men decide they have to go to Colorado. Their resident whiz kid, Michael, discovers a radio broadcast that's been asking for Amy to be returned. PILGRIMAGE.
Cronin spends about a third of the book talking about the lives of minor characters. I think this was some idea of his that giving extraneous information would flesh out each individual, but uh, no. Perhaps instead of giving me the detailed history of Galen Strauss, he could have made me empathize more with Peter. Or Amy, for that matter. Instead Peter wanders through the desert, shooting virals and struggling with his inner thoughts and exclaiming the idiotic word "flyers!", while Amy mumbles cryptic phrases that confuses the shit out of everyone.
And seriously, flyers?! I don't know why Cornin didn't choose OLIVE OIL or PIG TESTICLES or MAGNETS. They might have sounded less stupid as profanity than flyers.
There's no doubt that Cronin sets up a dark and interesting premise for this story. The first part of this book is terrifying. And his prose is not bad, but perhaps too poetic and long-winded. Most of this reads like a cheap Hollywood blockbuster. Except boring. I cannot even understand how his editor didn't take a box cutter to half of what was written.
I spent most of the book trying to puzzle out how Cronin won a PEN/Hemingway award because trudging through the later half of this book was a trial. I can't believe there are two other monstrous volumes left in this trilogy. I'm torn between curiosity and absolute dread. I suppose I'll have to see.
900 pages has left me feeling like I've just eaten 900 pringles. The plain ones.
I did not have high expectations of this and was partly reading out of curiosity to see what a modern YA/horror-lite/sci-fi that sold for millions looks like. However, I feel conned - it was just barely exciting enough to keep the pages turning but provided no nourishment at all.
I was not expecting great originality from anything based on vampires. I'll forgive the Blade rip offs and the Michael Crichton flavour was inevitable given the subject matter (Cronin had the decency to swap the Congo for the Amazon and keep that bit mercifully short). But the degree to which this rips off other, better stuff is a joke. Has Stephen King asked for his cut? I'd need to check but I sometimes felt I was reading copy and paste from The Stand, Salem's Lot, The Mist. It was not enough to appropriate all the post-nuclear-apocalypse sci-fi of my youth (even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!), he's also nabbed The Road and then moved into other film cliches. I don't think he missed a single set piece from any zombie movie ever. (Attack on military bunker? Check. Attack on farmhouse? Check. Attack on Mall? Check.)
Fine. Acceptable, expected even. If done excitingly then I even quite like the knowing tribute to genre (great artists steal and all that). But the real problem with this book is that he's also filled these long long pages with loads of pompous, portentous, tedious mystical guff. What he has borrowed most from might actually be the last two Matrix films, mystical old ladies and all. He's also created a strange characterless emptiness and even after hundreds pages I really don't particularly care about the main characters. The mindless vampires have more personality.
I'd quite like to know what happens in Book Two but cannot be bothered to munch through more of the just-compelling-enough blandness. Once you pop you can't stop.
I did not have high expectations of this and was partly reading out of curiosity to see what a modern YA/horror-lite/sci-fi that sold for millions looks like. However, I feel conned - it was just barely exciting enough to keep the pages turning but provided no nourishment at all.
I was not expecting great originality from anything based on vampires. I'll forgive the Blade rip offs and the Michael Crichton flavour was inevitable given the subject matter (Cronin had the decency to swap the Congo for the Amazon and keep that bit mercifully short). But the degree to which this rips off other, better stuff is a joke. Has Stephen King asked for his cut? I'd need to check but I sometimes felt I was reading copy and paste from The Stand, Salem's Lot, The Mist. It was not enough to appropriate all the post-nuclear-apocalypse sci-fi of my youth (even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!), he's also nabbed The Road and then moved into other film cliches. I don't think he missed a single set piece from any zombie movie ever. (Attack on military bunker? Check. Attack on farmhouse? Check. Attack on Mall? Check.)
Fine. Acceptable, expected even. If done excitingly then I even quite like the knowing tribute to genre (great artists steal and all that). But the real problem with this book is that he's also filled these long long pages with loads of pompous, portentous, tedious mystical guff. What he has borrowed most from might actually be the last two Matrix films, mystical old ladies and all. He's also created a strange characterless emptiness and even after hundreds pages I really don't particularly care about the main characters. The mindless vampires have more personality.
I'd quite like to know what happens in Book Two but cannot be bothered to munch through more of the just-compelling-enough blandness. Once you pop you can't stop.
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
It's The Stand meets The Walking Dead. Very Stephen King in style - loved it.
A reread in preparation for the release of The Twelve in October. I'm glad I reread it; I'd forgotten how good the writing is and how tight (mostly) the story is. Hurry, hurry, October!
I'm not entirely sure what to think of this book. I enjoyed it - it's actually the longest book that I've ever read. I felt like, in some ways, it suffered from having too many characters. If it had been about 200 pages shorter, I probably would have enjoyed it a bit more. That being said, I am hoping that the rumors of this being one in a trilogy are true. The ending definitely begs for at least a sequel.
Dnf at 69%. I don't care about these characters. The pace is slooooooow.