Justin Cronin's "The Passage" is a complex novel that at, over the course of its reading, left me at times enthralled and at other times enraged. I think that's a good thing, but if you ask me tomorrow, I may have changed my mind again.

What I can say about the book is that it's a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic that fits very nicely into a long and proud tradition of novels in which their author gleefully destroys most of humanity and then sets about telling us what happens in the aftermath. I've seen it compared to Stephen King's The Stand, and the comparisons are warranted. There is a long and utterly engrossing set-up to the end of the world, which eventually happens with remarkable speed. King spent more time dealing with the actual apocalypse part of his post-apocalyptic world than Cronin does, but considering the heft of the book as it is, it's perhaps for the best that Cronin literally skips over the 90 years or so between "when the bad stuff happens" and when the story picks back up.

The similarities continue throughout. There's a group of traveling friends, and not one but two old, black ladies who like to talk about God. There's a pregnancy and a divorce of sorts. There's a bad guy who is drawing others to him. There's a big showdown at the end and a pronounced denoument. Throught the book, people die. Most of them die badly. There's a lot of The Stand in here, yes. But to call the book a copy or even highly derivative would be an outright lie. It stands as its own work, one with is intriguing and exciting, pulse-pounding at times, sad or uplifting at others. There are characters to hate and love, although I never found myself hating and loving them quite so much as I have with some other books.

As a fellow author of "vampire books" (though my vampires are apples to Cronin's oranges), I love what he's done with the myth. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book, give or take, are nearly flawless. Cronin paints a portrait of a near-future United States that is hyper realistic, bound up in protocol inspired by fear over continued terrorist attacks, with states mistrusting each other and the federal government operating in many clandestine ways to get what it wants. You can SEE this world, you can feel it, because it's not so improbable. You become caught up in the story and the characters immediately, and you spend much of the time waiting for The Virals (as they become known) to break lose. You know it's coming and that it's going to be bad. Cronin doesn't disappoint here.

To say that the story shifts gears at this point is an understatement. It's something more akin to parking the car, getting out, and switching to an entirely different vehicle. Yes, it still takes place in the same world, with the same problems and even a few of the same characters, but in the 90-year shift the story also moves more out of the realm of Science Fiction and into that of Fantasy. I don't have an inherent problem with this, but I did find the shift jarring. I also found the sudden introduction of more than a dozen new characters a bit overwhelming at first, though in the end you figure out who's who, and you are properly outraged at the times you're supposed to be, when the heroes are being held up by people who don't understand that, damn it, they're the heroes and they're right.

The problems I had with the book, the things that threw me out of reading mode and made me frustrated, all happened in the second half and were mostly small issues. For one thing, Cronin is guilty of the extremely modern belief that all human beings immediately lose whoever they were before, at the moment they hear they are having a baby (or in extreme cases, at the moment of the baby's birth), and instead become dedicated only to the existence of that child. For another, I'm tired of old women who love God. I don't find any comfort in the idea of predestination or "God's Will" and I don't find characters who do to be particularly sympathetic.

I also had extreme issue with one decision a primary character makes, late in the novel, not even so much because I didn't like the decision, but because it's given barely an ounce of explanation and is a pretty clear setup for a later event. It felt like the character was only doing it because the story needed her to. If you're going to have the cavalry show up, you need a reason for why it wasn't there in the first place, and this reason seemed flimsy. The character in question supposedly has her reasons, but they're never given (or barely so), so the decision she makes seems amazingly arbitrary.

There are a few other moments like this -- Cronin kills off a character whose name might as well have been "Obvious Choice" at one point -- but I may be stressing the negative too strongly. In the end, the important thing was that whenever I put the book down, I always wanted to pick it up again, and preferably soon. This is the first in a trilogy, and I'm looking forward to the second and third books. They'll probably frustrate me too, but I bet they'll be a lot of fun to read while they're doing it.