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chestel 's review for:
The Passage
by Justin Cronin
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.