The hype machine was working. With some terrific reviews, this was immediately one of THE BOOKS TO READ for summer 2010, a vampire tale not written by Stephanie Meyer, and not even promoted very much as vampiric. Maybe our capacity for reading vampire novels has clotted somewhat?

The world in question begins in 2022. Gas is $13 a gallon. Iranian jihadists have killed hundreds at the Mall of America. Jenna Bush is Texas guv (this is a horror story, after all). New Orleans, battered by another monster storm, is now an uninhabitable industrial park. An expedition to a remote corner of South America, sponsored by the US Army, is searching for a promising and dangerous virus. What could possibly go wrong? The Passage is nothing if not very, very derivative. Although there are a few nifty new notions within its 766 pages, (I will not spoil them by telling) there will be little here that is not almost immediately familiar. Government projects gone wrong, post-apocalyptic struggles for survival, battles between good and evil, strong people, weak people, and lots and lots of vampires.

That said, I felt that there were almost two complete, independent books within the whole. The first tells of the beginning of the unpleasantness, lasts for 246 pages and is gripping. I hated to put the book down. Even with the been-there-read-that aspect of the book, there was something about the writing of that 246 pages that kept me turning the pages, thirsty for more. As for the remaining 520, not so much. We move forward almost a century and enter the too-familiar landscape of post-apocalyptic survival. Although there were elements here that were interesting, some characters that held promise, I found it a very, very long yawn. I also felt that the author cheated a few times too many in leading us to believe that certain events had taken place when they had not. He even jokes about it in the writing, having one character say out loud what any reader might wonder about how a particular event transpired.

If The Passage had kept up the frantic and so-engaging pace of its long opening, it would indeed have been one of THE BOOKS TO READ this summer. Instead of reading The Passage, though, I would look for an alternate route.

I gave it two stars instead of one because the beginning was so good. Otherwise, I resented the time it took to read this waaaaaay too long book.