So when I was reading Station Eleven, it had a glancing (and enormously spoilery) reference to Justin Cronin’s The Passage, which got me interested in reading it. So I did.
Turns out The Passage is an apocalypse novel (subgenre: epidemic, sub-subgenre: vampirism); it starts off well before the apocalypse and focuses on a handful of characters who are significant to the event; shortly after the event itself, it jumps forward some decades into the post-apocalyptic society that emerged from the rubble.
The apocalypse itself is interesting; the post-apocalypse… well, it’s okay. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly reasonable post-apocalypse. Good enough that after the book was over, I started in on the sequel, The Twelve.
Started, but didn’t finish. Because the problem is, The Twelve jumps back into the middle of the apocalypse with a set of new characters, which saps forward momentum. But okay, I can get through that before we get back to our story in progress… except then it jumps to a new set of post-apocalypse characters, which is yet another frustrating digression and for much less reason. And, halfway through the book, when it finally does get back to our main characters, their story is dull and repetitive enough that I just didn’t care anymore.
But I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair. The book wasn’t bad or anything, and I read over a thousand pages of it before calling it quits. If I can’t recommend it highly, I wouldn’t warn anyone off of it. If a vampire apocalypse sounds interesting to you, it’s worth a shot.
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