I’ve been trying to write about The Passage for awhile, but when I try, I just end up saying “Oh, it’s pretty good,” or something. It’s an epic book – it spans nearly a century, deals with an apocalyptic event that decimates the U.S. population, and combines eerie supernatural elements with a hard scientific rationale for vampirism. It is a horror story, a survival story and a story about introspection externalized as a physical journey. There is a parallel structure between the modern day story and the future story, and both are inextricably tied together. It is also a lumbering, laconic tome whose nearly 800 pages are the first part of a trilogy.
The biggest impediment to enjoying The Passage is that the novel itself fools you. The blurb and the first 200 pages tell one story, while the next 500+ deal with something completely unexpected. This kind of bait and switch walks a fine line between welcome surprise and outright deception and I think it crosses over to deception based on how little of the book is actually what it says it is.
It starts good, gets boring, gets good again at the very end and plays with your goodwill in the middle. Wait for the inevitable movie, which will probably be alright.
