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.