The enemy has evolved, and a dark new order has arisen with a vision of the future infinitely more horrifying than man’s extinction. One hundred years in the future, Amy and the others fight on for humankind’s salvation. These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned-and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death and ruin. Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her.
In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Now the scope widens and the intensity deepens as the epic story surges forward. In his internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Passage, Justin Cronin constructed an unforgettable world transformed by a government experiment gone horribly wrong.
For "ove had sealed their doom," Cronin concludes. Trapped by past happiness, they forget to survive. (And in the future there is no chocolate.) One woman is described as having "plunged down inside herself for too long." But faced with the apocalypse, survivors acquire the necessary emotional armor. His characters are wrenched from past loves. Most biting is Cronin's grim calculus of the human condition. Later, Cronin has Guilder musing on "the major problem with immortality, apart from the peculiar diet: everything began to bore you." Cronin's gallows humor is a welcome departure from the more treacly passages. Calling his security guards "overgrown frat boys," he wonders, "ere they grown on some kind of farm? Cultured in a petri dish?" Cronin's most tragic (and funny) character might be Guilder, a likable government man who loses his father to Alzheimer's and his heart to a hooker. His take on the "Homeland," his Orwellian militaristic colony, rips a page from today's headlines. The dreamy astral (or real?) travel to some heaven-like realm comes off as just plain silly.Ĭronin is more compelling when he gets real - and gets down and dirty.
The clumsy religious allegory of "The Zero" (the first scientist infected by the virus) and the dozen blood-drinking super-vampires (apostles, anyone?) is forced. The trope of telepathic communication among the 12 and various characters adheres to no clear logic.
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