Note: We’re sure you know all about Geek Speak’s spoiler policy… but just in case: This review contains significant spoilage. You are warned.

At first I was reluctant to pick up The Passage, touted by many a literary type as the must-read vampire novel of the summer. For one thing, after Geek Speak’s magnificent Issue 4, I was kind of vampired out. Also -- watch me commit heresy! -- I’ve never really warmed to Stephen King or Dean Koontz or any of those other guys whose work this novel was being compared to. Finally, though, I decided to give it a try, and you know what? I’m glad I did. Whatever one’s position on vampires, The Passage is one hell of a fun ride.

The Passage, the first book in a planned trilogy, begins the story of Amy, the Girl Who Lived a Thousand Years. A six-year-old child, abandoned by her parents, when we first meet her, Amy is the final subject in a top-secret government program to build a super-soldier by crossing vicious hardened criminals (which struck me as a spectacularly bad idea from the get-go) with evil South American bats (ditto). Now, Amy is neither vicious nor a criminal at any point in the book, and it was never altogether clear to me why the government suddenly switches over from experimenting on Death Row prisoners to experimenting on kindergarteners, but I could sort of roll with that. Anyway, the good news is that the protocol developed by the evil government docs eventually works perfectly. The bad news is, before it works perfectly, it works… imperfectly.

Which brings us to the vampires, or (as they’re variously called here) virals, smokes, flyers, or dracs. These are not the sort of Immortals you’re likely to encounter on network television; when the inevitable movie is produced (Ridley Scott has reportedly acquired the rights), it is unlikely that any of them will be portrayed by James Marsters, Kate Beckinsale, Alexander Skarsgård, or Ian Somerhalder. And unlike not a few of their literary antecedents, these vampires don’t pine over Prada, enjoy athletic sexual congress with their shellans, or fight crime. Instead, they’re creatures out of your worst nightmares: lightning-fast, inhumanly strong, orange-eyed, almost invulnerable, and with an insatiable thirst for blood. They kill most of their victims outright. Those are the lucky ones.

The twelve original virals plus Amy are guests of the United States government in a top-secret bunker in the Rocky Mountains when one dark night, the Twelve decide that it’s time to broaden their personal horizons. In the ensuing (shocking, stomach-turning) carnage, Amy is spirited away and protected by Brad Wolgast, an FBI agent with the sort of tragic past that law enforcers in these sorts of books tend to have. While the virals move across the continent spreading chaos and destruction, Wolgast cares for Amy as well as he can. Events, however, eventually overtake the pair.

Ninety-two years later, small pockets of humanity cling to survival. We are introduced to one such, the Household, a colony of humans tucked away in a walled township in California. Their walls are protected by powerful lights that blaze all night (the virals can’t tolerate light of any sort), but the virals are relentless and the attrition rate is high. One day, a young colonist named Peter Jaxon encounters Amy (now teenaged in appearance, although she’s nearly a hundred years old) while on a mission outside the walls. After sundry adventures within the colony, Amy and Peter eventually lead a band of survivors back to Colorado, where it all began.

This book is so crammed with incident that it reminded me of one of those serialized dramas from the good old days, where the protagonist would go from crisis to crisis to crisis and HOW WILL HE EVER GET OUT OF THIS ONE but then he does and then OH NOEZ BUT THERE’S A TORNADO BEARING DOWN ON HIM NOW!!!!! WITH A FIRE ON THE OTHER SIDE!!! AND THE U.S. MARSHALS WANT TO KILL HIM WITH THEIR GUNS!!!!! Other reviewers have referred to The Passage as a “pastiche,” and this is actually correct: There’s an evil government conspiracy and a mad scientist and a hooker with a heart of gold and not one but two Magical Black Women and a runaway train and human sacrifices and a gladiator coliseum and Back From The Dead (see below) and genocide and a couple of nukes and tense chases and hair-raising escapes and more, more, more! I would not have been surprised at all if the book had ended with Jesus Christ leading the survivors to safety on board his rainbow-colored UFO. (Actually, Jesus and UFOs are the two things this book this book doesn’t contain… but Cronin has two more books to work with, so I remain hopeful.)

And then there are the characters: You’ve got Hollis, who’s in love with Sara, who’s in love with Peter, who’s in love with Alicia, and everyone knows it but him. Separately, we meet Mausami, who marries Galen even though she and Theo are in love, because all three of them are idiots. (Sorry, I didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for anyone in that triangle.)

Somehow, though, Cronin pulls it off. At 750+ pages, this book is a doorstop, but the length does give the author plenty of room to maneuver. The writing is lively and he effectively keeps things moving, and even -- when reading individual scenes -- very tense. And he does a good job of making you care about the characters, and making you hope that nothing really bad happens to any of them.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint about this otherwise un-put-downable book: A lot of secondary characters die, and our protagonists stumble upon several notably horrifying scenes, but at the same time, we know from the first line of the book that Amy is the Girl Who Lived A Thousand Years, so she’s probably going to make it through, and every now and then you’ll see the odd offhand “It would be a very long time before Peter would…” suggesting that Peter will be around for, well, a very long time, and there are even passages referencing events that occur after 1000 A.V. (After Virals), i.e., 900 year after the events being related, so we know that no matter what else happens, the human race survives. Also, the principal characters are all evidently descendants of Rasputin, because each of them escapes imminent inescapable doom so many times that the prospect of a main character in jeopardy eventually stops carrying the same emotional weight that it should. (A good rule of thumb: If you, the reader, are not shown an actual corpse, don’t waste your tears.)

And that’s why I’m awaiting Book 2 with happy anticipation and not panic, despite the fact that we end on a major cliffhanger. As we close out, one of my favorite characters is ruminating on her adventures. She hears a noise outside, and… I’m not at all worried about her. But I can’t wait to see how Cronin gets her out of this one.
 
  -- Kate Nagy

FURTHER READING

Dead and Doing It, a guide to 20 vampire romance series, by Rachel Hyland and Kate Nagy