Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her. In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Now the scope widens and the intensity deepens as the epic story surges forward.
In his internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Passage, Justin Cronin constructed an unforgettable world transformed by a government experiment gone horribly wrong. The end of the world was only the beginning.For "ove had sealed their doom," Cronin concludes. Trapped by past happiness, they forget to survive. (And in the future there is no chocolate.) One woman is described as having "plunged down inside herself for too long." But faced with the apocalypse, survivors acquire the necessary emotional armor. His characters are wrenched from past loves. Most biting is Cronin's grim calculus of the human condition. Later, Cronin has Guilder musing on "the major problem with immortality, apart from the peculiar diet: everything began to bore you." Cronin's gallows humor is a welcome departure from the more treacly passages. Calling his security guards "overgrown frat boys," he wonders, "ere they grown on some kind of farm? Cultured in a petri dish?" Cronin's most tragic (and funny) character might be Guilder, a likable government man who loses his father to Alzheimer's and his heart to a hooker. His take on the "Homeland," his Orwellian militaristic colony, rips a page from today's headlines. The dreamy astral (or real?) travel to some heaven-like realm comes off as just plain silly.Ĭronin is more compelling when he gets real - and gets down and dirty. The clumsy religious allegory of "The Zero" (the first scientist infected by the virus) and the dozen blood-drinking super-vampires (apostles, anyone?) is forced. The trope of telepathic communication among the 12 and various characters adheres to no clear logic.
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