Thoughts on The Passage, by Justin Cronin

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow.

Amy is abandoned by her mother at the age of six and she is pursued by government agents, seeking expendables for a mysterious government experiment. Special Agent Brad Wolgast does his job, he's already collected a dozen men on death row. But he is drawn to this quiet and curious child, perhaps due to the memory of the daughter he lost. He will do anything to save Amy, and when the experiment goes unbelievably and catastrophically wrong, he helps her escape--into a society that is collapsing. The virus, death, humans turned into vampire-like monsters...

Amy survives. The country, and the rest of North America, doesn't, neither does most of the people. Amy "walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair" (back cover). 90-odd years later, she finds the Colony, a hidden fortress in California, where they have so little memory of the Time Before. For a while, Amy lives with Peter and Michael and Alicia and the others, in their Colony that is constantly on guard, watching, in a world where there really are monsters.

What is Amy's secret? Why is she still alive? Who or what is she? Where would the signal buried in her neck lead them? Can she save the world?

The familiar tropes of an apocalyptic dystopian novel are all here: the virus, the government secret experiment, the old world lost and destroyed, the strange and distorted successor societies. But Cronin takes these, and makes them his own, in a rich and dark and dangerous and beautiful novel.

I am looking forward to the sequel--as soon as my partner finishes it... And I really love it that his daughter asked him to write a story about a girl who saves the world and now, three novels later...



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