The Passage by Justin Cronin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Someone give this man an editor! The whole book could have been cut down to half its length. There are pages after pages of needless filler, only making me roll my eyes at all the trite, cliched paragraphs I was actually reading. I know it’s supposed to invoke some emotion for the characters, but I just kept thinking, "I’ve read this before."
Now don’t get me wrong, The Passage is a page-turner. But it doesn’t actually reveal itself as that until 200 pages into the book. If you ask me, that’s too long for a book to start getting interesting.
As for the story, it was the main thing that kept me going. I’m a big fan of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction and I had very high hopes for this one considering how everyone was raving about it. It even had some dystopia thrown in, but in the end, it left an ugly taste in my mouth.
Although there were full pages crammed with pseudo-science and explanations of the virus, nothing was that believable. The characters were either flat and one dimensional, or archetypes. There’s the pure, innocent girl whose destiny is to save mankind, the old cryptic, slightly crazy old mystic who has all the answers if only someone could take the time to sit down and really listen to her. There’s the tough-as-nails woman who has something to prove. Oh and the loyal, all-believing hero who comes to terms with something.
The Passage read like a long video-game. There are intense, suspenseful action scenes, but there are also a lot of clumsy, poorly-staged exposition chapters which just made me cringe.
The worst of all, the whole novel was some modern-day metaphor for Noah’s Ark. Viruses that turn people into vampires with super strength, I can stomach, but characters who act only because they think they hear the voice of god or think they’re on god’s mission? No thanks.
