Eve's Fan Garden

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction. Description from goodreads.

I am a sucker for a great opening sentence, and The Passage has one of the best opening lines I have read in a very long time:  Before she became the Girl from Nowhere– the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years– she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. It makes you want to read more, doesn’t it?  It made me want to keep reading that is for sure!  And the things I discovered as I read through this book were thrilling and horrifying, terribly sad, and also hope inspiring.  It was a thoroughly satisfying read.

You may have heard by now that this is a vampire book, but the vampires in The Passage in no way resemble traditional vampires in literature.  In the near future the U.S. Military uses death row inmates and a virus discovered in the jungles of Bolivia to try and create a new weapon, a kind of super soldier.  The virus changes the convicts into super nasty creatures, best described as vampires because of their blood lust and aversion to sunlight, although, zombies are probably a good description as well.  These virals, or smokes, as they are called in the book escape and within a fairly short amount of time the world as we know it has ceased to exist…  And that is only in the first 250 pages of the book and barely the beginning…  Did I mention that the ARC I read is 766 pages long?

Once we get to the second section of the The Passage the world looks vastly different.  Now, nearly 100 years after the initial outbreak, we are taken to a small settlement of survivors who live according to very strict rules in order to stay alive, and who, with good reason believe they may very well be the last remaining survivors on earth.  The destruction left after the outbreak is terrible, much of the United States  is now just a wasteland.  The members of the settlement rarely leave to go outside the walls, and NEVER after dark, as the virals come out after dark.  But how long can the survivors live inside the wall before something happens to force a change?

In this second section of the book we meet my very favorite characters, their stories have stuck with me in the week since I finished reading The Passage and I am sure will continue to do so for a long time.  I do not want to give away any key details which is hard when reviewing a book like this where so much happens.  This really is a beast of a book, its just huge, and SO many things happen.  I could easily give away something important.  So, I am going to instead say that Justin Cronin’s writing was superb.  He has such a lovely way of describing things, just like that first sentence, I found fantastic gems sprinkled throughout the book.  Often I would stop just to re-read a paragraph that’s beauty struck a deep chord within me.  And on the flip side of that his writing is so good that I got chills and actually shuddered while reading some of the horrible things that happen.  His story telling was brilliantly executed, I have seen some reviews that said they felt the middle was a bit slow, but I absolutely loved it.  I loved getting to know each character who would be playing an important role in the coming chapters.  I began to feel like I really knew them, they felt like real people and so everything that happened to them was that much more intense.

I was very happy to discover there is a sequel planned for The Passage, because I quite nearly panicked once I reached the last page and discovered that it was in-fact the last page.  I will be pre-ordering the sequel the first day that I can because I HAVE to know what happens next.  But for now I strongly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of post-apocalyptic/dystopian or horror even.  It is SO very good!

Check out the website for The Passage HERE, and be sure to check Justin Cronin’s tour dates HERE…  I wish he was coming to Arizona!

Also, watch this book trailer.

Before you go, please be sure to enter our giveaway. We are giving away 3 ARC’s of The Passage by Justin Cronin courtesy of Random House Books. Its easy to enter, it should only take a minute!

THANKS FOR ENTERING! THIS CONTEST IS OVER. CHECK BACK SOON FOR THE WINNERS!