The Passage by Justin Cronin

I love reading dystopian novels and even did a dystopian challenge earlier this year. I read both YA books as well as adult books. The Passage was also on my list, but was not available at the library at the time. I reserved it and ended up being the first one to read it.

A 1,000 pages of action! The book is very seldom boring but there were a few moments when I wanted the story to hurry up. It usually did.

The story is about a virus that is being tested. It would extend people’s lives if it worked. But instead, it turns the test patients into vampires. That is, they turn into human-like beings that are very strong and agile and that feed on normal humans.

The test patients all escape at some point and a disaster is looming. Amy is a little girl who was also one of the patients, but she has not turned into a vampire. She escapes with help of an FBI agent and lives remotely for a long time in an abandoned summer camp.

Ninety years later a group of people is living in relative safety in an area surrounded by walls and with flood lights that go on every night to deter the vampires.

Then Amy shows up, unafraid of the vampires and still at a young age. For the residents, it’s time to explore the world and bring Amy back where she came from.

The book takes place mainly in the “current” time which is a few years from now, and then in a time about ninety years later. The story is told as a text, a diary entry, some government reports, etc. The reader has to glue it all together himself, but this is not very difficult.

I very much enjoyed reading this book. There were not too many characters (which I had feared) and the number of pages was fine. I read it in about 4 or 5 days as the writing was not too difficult and the story compelling.

I’m not one for vampires, but in this book they made sense. It was clear how they may have been created and they were really just depicted as a group of beasts that attacked other people, although there was also an element of the supernatural which several people dreaming the same dream, for instance.

Rating: 5/5

I got this book: from the library. As I’m a big dystopia fan, I really wanted to read it.

I read this in: Dutch. The original language is English.