#18: The Passage, Justin Cronin

After The Passage was unofficially anointed as THE book of the summer, I gave it to my dad for Father's Day. I was incredibly excited to read it when I got home from Europe, especially as I had been struggling through Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which I never ended up finishing. And then I spent the next four weeks trying to pass through The Passage - why was everyone so crazy about this book? I don't get it; neither does my father. And yeah, I will do a little spoiling.

The Passage reminded me quite a bit of I Am Legend (a movie that, incidentally, when PMS hits right, makes me cry like a baby). The U.S. military attempts to convert convicts into super-fighting machines but all goes awry and the superhumans escape the lab facility and turn the population into vampire-like creatures. The doorstop-sized tome then jumps about 100 years into the future, to one ragtag community that has managed to insulate itself from the monsters with bright spotlights. After a young girl appears in their midst, a group of people - who have never known the world as it was - inadvertently sets out on a journey that will save everyone.

It sounds interesting enough, but I just couldn't get through it. It was well-written (except for the fact that my particular copy had some printing issues, so the last sentence on one page didn't lead to the correct sentence on the next) but it took me forever to read. And then, I found the ending to be pretty disappointing - after 766 pages full of nitty-gritty details, you have to assume the ending. The characters are on their way to eradicating the vampires when The Passage just ends. You know they eventually will from some future documents that pepper the book, but it's like, I have to guess how they got from here to there? After 766 pages? When the whole book is essentially about saving the world?