The Passage by Justin Cronin (4 stars)

The Stand meets I Am Legend meets The Road, what's not to like?

Cronin's venture into apocalyptic vampire fiction is unusual in that he covers both pre and post apocalypse in significant detail.  I think a lot of authors would have just started immediately after the viral outbreak, or even later after the survivors have been living behind the walls of The Colony for a number of generations.

The result is a huge break in the story almost exactly one third of the way through the book when the virus is released.  Many of the central characters die and are replaced by completely unknown, but even more important, characters.  This break in the story is quite unsettling, but on reflection I think it is something I like about the novel.

I was less impressed with the switches between Sara's journal epistolary style and the regular third person - it just seemed like a lazy way to fill in travel time, and much of it was boring: got food here, water there.  There were also some ridiculous coincidences sprinkled throughout the book, like when they find an orchard in Utah(!!) just after they had run out of food, followed by an Outdoor World when they really needed equipment and weapons.  Just as an aside Outdoor World would be my first stop for post-apocalyptic shopping :)

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic survival stories, so I liked descriptions of The Colony's daily life: watches, battle training, power maintenance, lights.  Hiding the horrors of the real world from the kids until they were 8 seems like a strategy that, while well meaning, could result in some serious psychological damage as their safe world crumbles.  What is worse?  Knowing or not knowing?

There are many parallels to The Stand: Auntie is very close to Mother Abagail, Vegas for the bad guys and Colorado for the good guys, and the apocalypse is caused by a virus that escapes from a military facility.  Having said that, The Passage is much less mystical/religious than The Stand.  The vampires/virals/smokes seemed to be directly lifted from I Am Legend.

Many people on amazon have described the book as horror, but it didn't read like horror to me.  However, it could be made into a fantastic and really scary movie.

I'm not sure how this will go as a trilogy - I thought Cronin tidied up more loose ends than were necessary, making for a ragged ending that dragged on for quite a while after the climax.  There are plenty more original virals to hunt down, so he has left himself plenty of story.

4 stars.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (2.5 stars)

I was ready to love this book. The Road and No Country for Old Men are both fantastic books, and many reviewers on Amazon claim this is McCarthy's best work. I don't agree.

Like most McCarthy books, it is often difficult to tell who is speaking and what is going on, but I was ready for that. What I wasn't ready for was the rambling dense prose, often waxing philosophical, so different from the punchy and intense dialogue of The Road and No Country:

Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

BUH??  I feel like one day McCarthy is going to say "Surprise! I wrote that with a computer program that looks up random words in a thesaurus!". A reviewer on Amazon summed it up perfectly with:

It's the kind of book everybody wants to have read, but few enjoy reading. As such, it naturally elicits a certain kind of intellectual pretension in those who have slogged through it.

Unlike other McCarthy books I can't even say the characters were great. The judge is a horrible character that commits seemingly random acts of violence, a sort of wild west version of Mark 'Chopper' Read. But we never really know him deeply, or indeed at all, and instead are left to wonder at the horror of his actions. The Kid, notionally the central character, is also bereft of any deep development.

The story McCarthy tells is of a band of American misfits on the wild west frontier. They become killers tasked with collecting scalps of Apaches and other Indians, before turning their hand to collecting scalps of pretty much anyone: Mexicans, settlers, and their own. All of this happens in a dream-like landscape alternating between gore, complex descriptions of the desert, and philosophy.

2.5 stars.