The Passage (The Passage, #1)

by Justin Cronin

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. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

I'm excited to share some Notes about "The Passage!" And if you like these, make sure to check out my new book, "The Ferryman" (May 2, 2023). Sometimes you get lucky with a first sentence, and that’s what happened here. I didn’t begin writing "The Passage" until I had a pretty detailed outline of the book (and quick sketches of the next two volumes). So, when I actually sat down to write, I knew where the story was headed, but I didn’t know the ‘voice’ yet, how the story would actually feel on the page.I wanted the first sentence to give a sense of the vast sweep of time it contained but also communicate the more intimate texture of the story-- which is, after all, the story of a little girl (who just so happens to be the girl who saves the world). In other words, I wanted an opener that communicated the entire novel in a single sentence.

Richards remembered the day—that glorious and terrible day—watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24–7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn’t even remember why. He’d thought it right then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they’d all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and...

My working theory of villainy in fiction is that the best villains need to be smarter and more interesting than everybody else. Richards is no exception. He’s more than a cynic; he’s the dark prophet of the novel, the man who knows just how bad the world is and how much worse it’s about to get.This delights him; he had no illusions about himself and knows he’s a man perfectly suited for the age. That said, I wrote this part of the novel during some of the worst of the Iraq war. By 2005, the conflict had devolved into a total quagmire with no clear end. The post-9/11 “war on terror” was looking very much as if it was going to become a permanent condition—a grinding, never-ending state of conflict, dispersed across the globe. Twenty years later, it seems I wasn’t wrong—and neither was Richards.

It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.

Wolgast is a man who’s been lying to himself, and it’s time for him to snap out of it. Sykes recruited him because of his daughter’s death—even at the time, Wolgast understood the manipulation, but decided to go with it anyway—and since then, he’s gotten one signal after another that Project Noah is a horrible idea. And yet, until now, he’s chosen to ignore them; it’s easier to just go along. His job recruiting the inmates is an analgesic for the pain of Eva’s death, and he’s also very good at it—a man who can “sell sunlamps in a cancer ward.” What jars him from his compliant stupor is, of course, Amy. She turns him back into a father—the man he truly is—and what choice does a father have but to protect his child?

What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

The fact that so many people have highlighted this sentence tell me I must be onto something—both about zombies and about being of a certain age. Here’s the thing about zombies: they’re always dressed for work. You have your accountant zombie, your diner waitress zombie, your UPS delivery-person zombie, your tweedy college-professor zombie (that zombie would be me), and so on. I think that the hold that zombie stories have on us—and these are nothing if not zombie-rich times—comes from our ambivalence to the ways that life, and our jobs especially, turns us from people into roles, into uniforms filled by bodies, marching through the day.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.

One question I ask every character is this: What’s the stone you wear around your neck? By this I mean the secret weight that every person carries, the pain that’s always with them, even if (and especially if) it’s something they don’t talk about. I think of it as “the past that’s always present.” For Michael and Sara, the stone is their parents’ suicide—the great unmentionable tragedy of their lives. It shapes nearly everything they do (Sara is a healer; Michael, a problem solver) and it’s the bedrock of their bond.

A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

What does it mean to have a baby in a post-apocalyptic future where death can sail down from the trees at any moment? For that matter, what does it mean to get out of bed every morning? To have a job, friends, a family? To fall in love? Because people are people; they’ll still do all these things, or try to. It’s when they stop that things really fall apart. So, Mausami’s and Theo’s baby is a nugget of hope, as all babies are, but especially in these circumstances, when there’s so little hope to go around.

The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch.

I simply loved writing in Auntie’s voice. She possesses two kinds of wisdom: the wisdom of age, of simply having lived so long and seen so much; and the wisdom of having known the world of “the time before.” Everybody in the Colony has a job, and hers is to remember—to be the keeper of the past. And for her own life, she has a great accepting grace. There’s sorrow there, for the events of the past, but also a faith that life will take you where you’re supposed to go.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

This is a dark thought to be sure—it’s a sentence about suicide—but it made sense to me in the psychological context of the novel. First Colony is on its last legs. The population is collapsing. The batteries are failing. First Colony is humanity’s lifeboat, and it’s taking on water faster than its inhabitants can bail. It’s an excruciating way to live.

All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.

When I wrote this sentence (which, speaking honestly, I didn’t see coming), it felt like a big moment in the novel. This small band has become a fighting force. They’re wearing Army uniforms, driving Army vehicles, carrying Army rifles. But most of all, they’ve stopped waiting. They’re taking the future into their own hands.

Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. It’s hope that’s hard.

In the world of "The Passage," and for members of the Watch especially, courage is simply a requirement of life. It’s a world in which you’re either brave or dead. (And often both.) What sets Peter apart and makes him a natural leader (even though he’d swear he isn’t), is his intrinsic belief that the struggle to survive in this world can amount to something.