The Passage

At the urging of a friend, recently I picked up and read Justin Cronin’s hot new novel of vampire apocalypse, The Passage. After I was done, I wrote him back with my thoughts. “You say you liked it,” he wrote back. “But you sure criticized it a lot.”

The Passage is one of those books that plays fast and loose with its storytelling predecessors, not even bothering to disguise its sources. It opens with a bunch of American tourists being attacked by bats in a remote corner of South America, like in some nineteen-fifties B-movie. Then it cuts to a section in which the U.S. Military, astonished by the regenerative powers the tourists develop after their attack, decide to militarize the virus; they inject it into twelve death row criminals—really the wisest choice for creating invincible killing machines in this kind of story, always—and one abandoned little girl. This part of the book is very much like every science fiction movie I’ve seen in the last twenty years in which the government is doing secret research, and a whole lot like Kate Bush’s song, “Experiment IV,” because you know it’s just going to go downhill from here.

And it does. In a section not so much similar to The Stand as directly cribbed from it, the virus escapes. The country is overrun; everyone dies. Everyone save 49 million vampires, that is, and a handful of survivors who resort to one last hope to keep the race alive.

Cut to a hundred years later. The possible last handful of human survivors has been living in a tiny colony in California, kept safe by arrays of blinding lights that keep the vampires at bay every night. The remaining men, women, and children are simple folk who know aught of the old ways, living from day to day, and from hand to mouth, in a simple existence, much like the people of The Village. Except they have some really highly-skilled engineers who know all about circuit boards and other stuff that surely comes in convenient later in the story. Actually, it’s more similar to the YA postapocalyptic novel The City of Ember, because bit by bit, the lights are going out, and soon will be gone forever. So naturally a group of intrepid and good-looking youths go venturing out into the vast wilderness that is now all that’s left of North America, to search for safety.

And this is where the novel turns into Logan’s Run, in which a bunch of naifs who’ve never before seen the world escape from their closed society and run into all kinds of weird stuff. There’s a Thunderdome, and a locomotive that the engineers who’ve never seen one before are miraculously able to fix, and creepy scenes in which the party enter and barely escape from a vampire-filled Las Vegas. There are Scrappy Military Men, and The Miracle Of Childbirth, and One Child to Save Them All, and because there weren’t enough unoriginal archetypes to fill out the book, not just a Wise Old Magic Negro Woman, but also a Saintly Psychic Wise Old Magic Negro African Nun.

The reason my friend recommended The Passage was that it’s got the stink of being a classy, literary vampire novel. Cronin has those MFA and literary award credentials that make it okay and even a little ironic for him to slum in genre fiction. One of my big problems with the book, though, is that the writing is often not very good. Not always. There will be lovely page after page in which he sucks you in, describing the sad, lonely landscape abandoned by people and left for ruin. Then he’ll write a few lines of dialogue and leave me astounded by how bad he is at it. After I read the book, I went back to see exactly what the proportion of types of prose was in The Passage. Cronin appears to write about twenty pages of internal monologue or description to every page of dialogue between characters, and with good reason. No one talks like any of his characters do. They’re all turgid and wooden the moment they open their mouths.

He’s not the most subtle of writers, either. In the Las Vegas sequence, which could have been one of the most creepy scenes in the book, he throws away and suspense about what will be happening by starting the scene with prose that runs pretty as follows:

“What is that awful smell?” asked Peter The Wimpy Hero, wishing his older, stronger brother were here, the older brother who had always taken care of him since the premature death of the father he had never known. Why did he wonder that, he wondered with a wondering thought? Was it perhaps because he felt he still had to prove himself? “I have never smelled anything like this awful smell during my idyllic but oh-so-sheltered days in the Colony.”

“By gosh, it is a giant pool of highly flammable methane,” said Alicia, the tough and reckless. Whipping around with the cat-like reflexes that she had learned at the knee of the old Colonel, she pointed her gun into the shadows, the darkling shadows that rippled and pulsed with inky malice. “Conveniently enough to blow up this entire deserted hotel! Imagine what could happen if someone were to throw a match into that murky morass, whether by accident or dire last resort!”

Peter gulped. “Golly, it sure is an awful smell. I sure do hope we do not have to resort to such drastic explosive measures to fend off vampires in three pages!”

Yeah. It’s pretty much like that in parts, all the way through.

Another thing I disliked about The Passage is that when the going gets intense, Cronin finds it easier to resort to flowery literary writing than to describe what’s actually going on. This left me confused after major plot points, because frankly, I couldn’t really figure out who was being attacked, who was dying, and who was dead after. Eventually I came up with a handy legend:

Pages of prose about red flowers blossoming on an pond of scarlet = A vampire is probably sucking someone’s blood.

Mystical prose about the winds whispering names and the trees stirring in response across a vast and empty world with but one question on its wooded lips = We haven’t driven home the little girl’s magical powers enough in recent chapters, so you’re getting a damned good dose.

Folksy southern dialect going nowhere = Must be talking about that Mentally Challenged Gentle Giant Black Magic Negro from The Green Mile again.

Pages upon pages about rats = Minor character about to be offed. Or mind-controlled. Or something.

Don’t even get me started about the book’s climax. The resolution was so silly, and so easy, and so improbable, that I was a little disappointed.

But here’s the thing: despite all my crabbing, and despite spending the entire time I read The Passage making mental notes about where I’d seen its elements before (and you have seen these elements before, ladies and gentlemen, every single one), it was really quite an exciting book. A page-turner. It’s hard to put down. He makes me want to read the other two books of the trilogy, just to see what happens.

It’s no easy feat to keep an audience engaged. To make a reader want more is the ultimate goal of any writer, literary or not. And even during the parts I was rolling my eyes, or smirking, or narrowing my gaze and thinking, oh, really?, there wasn’t a single page of The Passage in which I considered putting down the book and moving on to something else.

That is not in the least faint praise. It’s almost something of a recommendation, if you’re willing to take the book for what it is, and ignore the claims of Justin Cronin being the literary savior of the horror genre.