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A review by tannervolz
The Passage by Justin Cronin
2.0
There are times when I think Stephen King—simultaneously one of our very best and very worst writers simply by virtue of his productivity and lack of interest in sensible editors—has FUBAR’d pop fiction. I’ve only read a bit of shitty King (Shining) and a handful of brilliant stories, and that right there is half the problem. His influence has paved the way for endless messes like this and countless awful streaming placentas that nail their tents to that modern simile and signpost for mediocrity: it’s like a 12 hour movie! So yeah, “The Passage” never ends—it’s so long I don’t remember when or if it ever started. Its length of course isn’t a problem in itself; the problem is that it constantly loses sight of its own mission thanks to distracting side quests, tertiary characters who appear only to disappear and maybe reappear, and inert relationships—all to make some points about the malleability of stories and how our realities and even time itself are created by consensus.
If much of this didn’t read like prose storyboards for Peak TV, I’d have much kinder things to say about Cronin’s prose which is frequently beautiful and insightful. Once he brings us inside his casts’ minds (I have no doubt he fan-casts his own work), we enter a whole other room, a creative space where anything seems possible, where the end of the world and armies of vampires don’t read as a goof. If these were his book, “The Passage” might sit with “Station Eleven” or “Last of Us” (pick your medium). As it is, it’s a wildly ambitious, overwrought mess that is relentlessly entertaining, a dissonant wreck, as fun as it is irritating. I’m compelled to read the sequels, after 30 hours of building a functional mental model of whatever this “universe” is meant to be.
If much of this didn’t read like prose storyboards for Peak TV, I’d have much kinder things to say about Cronin’s prose which is frequently beautiful and insightful. Once he brings us inside his casts’ minds (I have no doubt he fan-casts his own work), we enter a whole other room, a creative space where anything seems possible, where the end of the world and armies of vampires don’t read as a goof. If these were his book, “The Passage” might sit with “Station Eleven” or “Last of Us” (pick your medium). As it is, it’s a wildly ambitious, overwrought mess that is relentlessly entertaining, a dissonant wreck, as fun as it is irritating. I’m compelled to read the sequels, after 30 hours of building a functional mental model of whatever this “universe” is meant to be.