Book Review - The Passage by Justin Cronin

Trilogy- The Passage

In these encouraging times when the swarm of invisible deadly Covid virus finally seems to be going out from the globe, I read this science-thriller-fiction trilogy recommended by my younger brother.

The chronological order of this voluminous vampire-virus trilogy is:

1st book- The Passage (2010),

2nd book- The Twelve (2012), and

3rd book- The City of Mirrors (2016).

Melding apocalyptic fiction with straight-up horror, these books swoop over in time…i.e. from the near-future, when a classified team of government scientists experiments to formulate a medicine that will render forever immunity to 1,000 years in the far-future when a leftover human is striving to exist and circumvent the "virals" that have annihilated most of the world population.

It is an epic and gripping tale of the catastrophe and survival story of Amy, the lead character. This trilogy has all the masala from vivid characters across centuries, shocking scenery, emotions, the spill of blood, and happiness of birth and faith. This is a story of the never-ending mortal spirit that stood tall battling 12 Viruses and their army of many.

Justin Cronin has inventive storytelling, masterly prose, and profundity of human-sense insight. Cronin is so good at establishing the vastness of the world he created in the far future. The shocks and twists abound, the temperament of characters, the surprising return of those who perished, and a palpable sense of humanity's enduring legacy - triumphs and missteps...all is present here.

For me, it was a refreshing fiction read. At points, I was confused and had to re-read the old chapters just to correlate the character's beginning (and there are over 30 characters in the trilogy!!) but once the storyline establishes, I found the read to be amazing.

Sharing some of the quotes from the first book of the trilogy, The Passage -

“We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.”

“So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.”

“She waited for a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place,… where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.”

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”

“It wasn’t a small thing, to love a person.”