Zombie Night in Canada

As I said a couple weeks ago, I read Justin Cronin’s The Passage fairly recently.

I have to admit, even though I’m not a vampire fan (gothic, sparkly or otherwise), this book was pretty good.

While I don’t know if it really compares to Stephen King’s The Stand, it is a massive post-apocalyptic tome. Unlike King’s work, this novel, like so many these days, is targeted at the young adult market like Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. Cronin reported wrote it because his daughter had asked him to write a novel about a girl who saves the world.

The book is broken into two main parts – the first third of the novel looks at the conditions leading up to the apocalypse and the larger second part looks at life 90 or so years after the apocalypse occurred. I found the transition a bit jarring, but once it was explained and the characters introduced, it was okay.

The enemy in the book could loosely be called vampires, Cronin however calls them virals and for the story, I found it a better name than vampire. Anyways, virals are sensitive to bright light, are incredibly strong, can only be killed by hitting them in the breastbone, have fangs and claws and enjoy the taste of blood. As the novel progresses, we also learn that they have telepathic powers and the ability to turn people into virals (by biting them instead of killing them outright).

The novel itself starts off with a bang.

A team of researchers and soldiers head deep into the jungles of South America in pursuit of a Bolivian vampire bat that supposedly has the ability to cure most diseases. Of course, the team is attacked and most of them wiped out and the few survivors change into something unknown and incredibly dangerous. After that, Project Noah, a secret US military research lab in Colorado begins recruiting ‘volunteers’ to test a serum derived from these vampire bats. One by one, the test subjects are injected with a test serum and they too mutate into something very dangerous. Cartwright, the military man in charge of the lab uses a pair of FBI agents to locate and bring back death row inmates for experimentation. Eventually, they are tasked with kidnapping Amy Bellafonte for use in the project, as the head scientist (Dr. Lear) thinks her immune system is not fully mature and will form a symbiosis with the virus and live with her sympathetically,

Of course as usually occurs in a post-apocalyptic novel, something goes awry at Project Noah and the test subjects escape from the lab and then proceed to wipe out humanity.

The second two thirds of the book examines life in The Colony, believed to be the only living human settlement in all of North America. First Colony is a town surrounded by a high wall and protected by massive banks of lights (powered by a powerplant located 10 miles away) that keep the virals away mostly. It takes a while, but eventually Cronin explains the origins of First Colony, how it operates and who lives there.

While most of this section is interesting, I couldn’t get past the age of most characters and found the plausibility of some aspects of the story unbelievable. During the apocalypse, trained soldiers with assault rifles and other modern weaponry were unable to protect people from the virals, yet in the second part of the book, teenager armed with crossbows and short swords are able to do it with relative ease. Being a book targeted at the YA crowd, it also has romance, love triangles, and teenage angst galore, another turn-off personally speaking. Finally, there is a plethora of characters, occasionally making it hard to remember who is who (outside of the main group of about ten) and many of them are thinly written and not very well fleshed out.

Still, having said that, the book is a solid post-apocalyptic read and, while maybe not a classic as the blurbs scream, it is worth your time. Four stars out of five.