Reviewing THE PASSAGE: Dronely the Lonely
WARNING: BIG SPOILER ALERT–GO NO FURTHER IF YOU PLAN TO READ THE PASSAGE.
Okay you’ve been warned about THE PASSAGE. So trudge along with me.
The Passage is a novel written by Justin Cronin, a professor of English at Rice University. It was published by Random House in 2010. Before I began to read The Passage, I read the back page of acknowledgements where the list contained many famous names like Ridley Scott, higher ups at Random House, Creative Artists Agency, Orion, Ballatine–you get the picture–this guy knows people. A look at his bio gives a hint as to why. He’s written some award winning material and earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop –a great place to network I’m sure. Plus, Justin Cronin is cute. All of those Rice girls I think, would agree.
I don’t recommend The Passage. Here’s an overview of the book and as I read the last page, my reasons for wanting to throw it against a wall:
The book is 766 pages long. The first 208 pages are really, really good–almost brilliant. The story begins with a five year-old girl (Amy), the child of a friendless single mother who abandons her at a convent. There’s a nun named Lacey, who is a survivor of civil war in Sierra Leone. Hoping to care for Amy and keep her at the convent, Lacey tells little white lies.
Then, the narrative jumps to first person in emails where we learn about research going on in the Amazon jungle. They’ve found a batman statue down there. I don’t mean the super hero–this thing sports fangs and attitude. The US military is involved and in a horror novel, that’s never good. The scientists aim to conquer death (one named Lear is grieving the death of his wife). Several scientists are killed and eaten by vampire bats; we’re left wondering what the scientists found before they became bat food.
We skip to a secret research facility. The military is busy with Lear’s help, experimenting on a dozen condemned murderers. This segment, with its seeping creeping dreams, experienced by the sex-offender personnel, as they record vitals and clean up the guano of the new “bat men,” who hang upside down in their cells, rivals the vampire dreams of Salem’s Lot. It’s very scary.
Two FBI agents recruit the death row inmates and this is where Cronin’s skill really shines. We meet Carter, a bewildered little man who is on death row for accidentally killing his benefactress, a housewife who rescued him from under a bridge and gave him work, a home and dignity. Carter, a gentle soul, accepts his fate. Wolfgast, one of the FBI men, grieves the death of his infant daughter. Wolfgast reluctantly recruits Carter, recognizing that the man is not a killer. Carter’s journey to the research facility is Cronin at his best; we see Carter’s enjoyment–amazed at the America that his poverty and friendlessness denied him.
Then, Lear wants to test the serum on a child. Wolfgast and Doyle, his partner, are sent out to find one who won’t be missed. Back to Amy. Lacey takes Amy to the zoo. Amy makes the TV news when all the animals freak out and try to follow her. To Lacey, Amy explains cryptically” “They know what I am.” Okay, except that this whole segment is never explained to the reader and it happens way before any of the events that might have led to Amy’s weird behavior. You assume that it, along with Lacey’s prescience will be given an explanation. Not.
Wolgast tries to rescue Amy but is stopped by trigger-happy government guy Richards, a character who is the poster child for overkill–he kills all the nuns for pete’s sake. The writing has been so good so far that you forgive the cartoon excess. The best two hundred pages ends with Wolfgast rescuing Amy after she’s been given a giant dose of refined bat juice. The convict batmen get free and kill everyone. Somehow, Lacey tracks them down (she wasn’t home when Richards killed the other nuns) and we leave her as she distracts the batmen (later called virals) so that Amy and Wolfgast can get away. The last page of these 208 ends with Amy being alone with no one to protect her.
The rest of the book–all 548 pages begins almost one hundred years after the virals have pretty much killed the world. It centers on the “Colony” a small group of survivors located in California. Exposition is in the form of a document presented at a “World Conference” in “1015 av.” Okay, so we know that there’s a world and conferences and that mankind as a global civilization ultimately survives. Now back to the document–a first person account written by a woman who was the oldest person at the “Colony’. Her name was Ida. Think The Stand’s “Mother Abigail.” Ida makes awful tea and blurts out remarks like she knows what’s going to happen. She doesn’t. The Colony survives by vigilance and keeping the lights on at night to keep out the virals and protect the “Littles” (as in Lord of the Flies “little-uns”) who stay segregated in a schoolhouse. Unfortunately, the batteries are dying and so in desperation, the “Watchers” turn on the forbidden radio, hoping to signal for help. It comes in the form of a teenage girl–Amy who, after a hundred years has managed to hit puberty. She can’t talk.
I could name some of the zillion characters who continue the story, which jumps from one character to the other in a third person narrative. Not one pops out. Cronin doesn’t give enough weight to any of them to make us care. I kept waiting for the writing to get better–to get anywhere near the caliber of the first section. There’s a series of forays, attacks, discoveries and we finally learn that all forty something million virals are telepathically connected to one or the other of the original twelve convicts–like giant bee colonies and each convict is a queen bat-bee. If you can kill one of the original, then those connected will remember who they are and will hang around until the sun comes up until they burn and then fly to that great hive in the sky. Right. This all happens at the very end and what really frosts my shorts is that Cronin leaves us hanging. He doesn’t tell us how or when the world is saved. In fact, the last “document” presented at the “World Conference” reveals the assumed death of one of the major characters. We don’t know for sure because Cronin has a habit of killing someone off at the end of a segment then beginning the next segment by informing us that they were rescued by some fluke. This is lazy writing. Cronin knows better and we the readers deserve better. The ending was very frustrating and I felt had.
Unless you want to be really really annoyed, I don’t recommend The Passage.
Congratulations on your success Mr. Cronin. Next time give us a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
McCammon’s “Swan Song” — Apocalypse Then
Colliding worlds, epidemics, vampires, aliens, zombies–writers just love ending the world and we just love reading about how it all goes down. Everyone dies, except us–or those characters who are our surrogates. One particularly gruesome ending has fallen out of favor–World War III with its mushroom clouds and the President in the War Room agonizing on whether or not to take 
the Ruskies with us into that bad night of a nuclear winter. He always does.
Because the world is different now from the world of the mid-eighties when McCammon wrote Swan’s Song, what limited appeal this novel possessed has all but evaporated. I’m a boomer and all boomers relate to the fear of global nuclear war; we grew up with it. McCammon renders the nuclear nightmare in vivid detail, focusing on characters struggling to free themselves from environments that saved their lives but now threaten to become tombs. One particular bit of irony is a survivalist enclave dug into a mountain. There’s a gym, a movie theater, apartments, etc. and as always happens–the best laid plans go down. A whole mountain collapsing on you–take that survivalists. No control of your fate–all luck of the draw. Unlike Stephen King‘s The Stand, another end-of-the world scenario, we’re not invested in McCammon’s characters. I think that’s because he devotes so much of the novel to showing us how devastating an all out nuclear war would be, not just to humans, but to everything. It’s hard to say who the protagonist is– I guess it would be Swan–a young girl who can talk to plants and it is Swan who will save the world by giving pep talks to trees, grass, crops etc, spreading seeds and re-growing where ever she goes–a kind of “Swannie Appleseed.” Sorry, I couldn’t resist. The antagonist, similar to The Stand‘s Randall Flagg is a devil with a small “d.” The devil keeps whining about how it’s now “his” party and he gets to decide what happens, which is everybody and everything dies. I kept wondering–if he gets his way, what will he do for entertainment when everyone is gone. Of course he doesn’t win–Swan has his number and puts him in his place.
This novel was long–way too long–over 800 pages. McCammon could have carved out at least two hundred pages of that fruit and nut ingredient necessary to every apocalypse mix–the military mad men, the crazies and the religious zealots. The battle scenes were detailed and endless. In terms of characters–there’s lots of pat psychoanalysis but not much in the way of real people to care about. Like King’s The Stand, McCammon’s Swan Song indicates he doesn’t care a lot for the military or much in the way of government.
I know McCammon can write–I read Boy’s Life years ago and it was such a pleasure. I intend to read some of his other novels and expect I’ll enjoy them. One thing–I’m glad that threat of a nuclear winter is diminishing. On top of everything, there would be nothing to eat–unless of course you’re a zombie.
Author Profiled: Edwin Stark
A doomed vampire hunter. A kid trapped in the sewers with an undead thing. A town that could be yours… but hides a terrible, dark secret. A scary cosmic balance. A dead brother and his revenge beyond the grave. An unspeakable future and three eerie girls: all these elements lurk within Cuentos. From Horror to Sci-fi, these 10 little creepy tales will make you wonder about things that go bump in the dark.
Edwin Stark was born in Caracas, Venezuela during 1967, the year of the great Quake there (somehow, I see both events relating to each other). Since I was ten, I dreamt about startling others with my tales, but my attempts to publish in my home country were less than stellar. When self-publishing finally came around the corner, I decided to ditch Spanish as my writing language, with better results (my first book was awful and it’s a good thing that they live by the motto: “If you don’t have something nice to say about it…”; my second book has been raking in 4 and 5-stars reviews like crazy). I’m currently writing the sequel to Eco Station One, maybe the funniest thing I ever wrote.
Book Link: http://www.amazon.com/Cuentos-ebook/dp/B004HILPTQ
Devil’s Fire is Marjorie Kaye’s neglected step-child-novel
I have to be honest.
This is my second blog. The purpose of this second blog is to promote my first book, Devil‘s Fire, a novel that deals with demons, Druids, identity theft and retail. Devil’s Fire is a new title. The first title was A Servant’s Child. It didn’t sell and it seems that in this new world of self-publishing, you better be able to sell as well as write.
So I changed the title and did a new cover.
This helped, but only a little. I had created my first blog to promote my second book, a science fiction novel, Virtual Enterprises, Inc. That’s a re-title; it used to be Babylon Dreams. I’m proud of this blog. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but what it does get is steady and I have fun with it. The result of all that fun? My first book, which is more genre with some literary aspects, was sorely neglected–maybe because from start to finish with rewrites and research it took over three years to get to where it is now. In contrast, the second book, which is more literary than genre, was finished in six months and almost wrote itself. We often favor the easy child. In an effort to correct this neglect, I decided to give Devil’s Fire its due. During the process I realized how important it is to get the word out and tell people about the book–a very challenging and delicate enterprise. As I explore the book threads and forums, I’ve learned a lot and have encountered many sophisticated well-read people. Some, like me, are writers. I enjoy the discussions and the getting-to-know-yous. Some people like to shoot you down, but most are kind and supportive.
One piece of advice I hear repeatedly is to have a blog.
At first, I assumed, I had this covered by my first blog. Okay, I’m an idiot. I haven’t decided yet if I will self-publish my second book. It’s still out to a couple of publishers and I’m waiting to see. Until I either get a publisher, or take the plunge again and self-publish, there’s nothing really to sell or promote. At the moment, much of this blog deals with what’s happening now in science that supports my premise of a future where companies hawk highly profitable after-death virtual environments to the public, a kind of immortality via mind-uploading.
So back to Devil’s Fire.
It’s a good book. That’s my opinion, I know. Devil’s Fire is scary, funny and entertaining–a good read for a vacation, a sick day, or to take your mind off of the distance between you and the ground as you sit on that 737 jet. But one book does not a blog make. Again–my opinion. So I plan to post more of my opinions on books and movies, especially horror and science fiction. Some are well known and some maybe written or recommended by my new forum friends. Please feel free to offer suggestions and comments. I’m playing this all by ear, but at least I’m playing, and Devil’s Firewill get the ball rolling.//
Here’s the link to Devil’s Fire : http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A562FK
Here’s the link to my first blog: marjoriekayesbabylondreams.com
About Marjorie Kaye (me)
I graduated from UCLA, worked briefly as an actress before raising a family in Reno, Nevada. I spent several years casting film and television projects, and later taught English in the Los Angeles public school system. Needing to escape from the daily swirl of paper airplanes, gum wads and students texting while ignoring my threats, I decided to write a horror novel.
The result is “Devil‘s Fire,”a tale inspired by a family story. “Virtual Enterprises, Inc., my second novel is science fiction. Social satire, soap opera and morality tale, it deals with life after death in a virtual reality computer program. My sci fi blog is marjoriekayesbabylondreams.com. Currently, I’m writing a third novel, “Six Tourists Who Were Not Human.” 
Here’s the link to Devil’s Fire : http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A562FK
Here’s the link to my first blog: marjoriekayesbabylondreams.com
Here’s a link to the prologue for Babylon Dreams: http://marjoriekayesbabylondreams.com/prologue/
Since I first wrote this page, I decided to rewrite Babylon and change the first person into third. I plan to post a prologue soon on my babylondreams site. The process has put me behind on posts for both blogs. They won’t be as frequent but I will continue to post.
For more information on Devil’s Fire check out my April 13 post, Devil’s Fire is Marjorie Kaye’s neglected step-child-novel
I’m very interested in what inspires writers in terms of books, background experiences–what they read as kids–etc. And also readers–what moves them and makes them want to keep reading. If anyone has anything to share on this, please let me know and perhaps you’ll consider letting me post it. My favorite genres are sci fi and horror but I like anything that’s a good read. I’m of course using my blog to promote my book but also because we’re all here for the reason that we love the written word. It reaches across time and connects us to hearts and minds. My email is marjorienbl15@gmail.com
I subscribe to Netflix. It seemed like a good idea, all those movies available for ten dollars a month, but have you noticed how few really good films you can access? I have a number of books I’m reading but my attention span being what it is, I decided to scroll through Netflix offerings; I explored both the horror and the science fiction sections. There’s not very many good ones I haven’t already seen, however I did select some for my instant queue. In filling my queue I used the Netflix rating. When they say something’s less than two stars, trust me, you need to take that seriously. Everything I picked is at least a two starrer. In the interest of keeping this blog current, with new posts once or twice a week, I plan to take a look at the horror and science fiction offerings from Netflix and post my subjective opinion. Of course when there’s something new, that’s even better.
