Tag Archives: Thrillers

Book Review

Review: The Passage

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The Passage Book Cover

The Passage
By Justin Cronin
Random House
June 2010
784pp

The Short of It:

If you take only one book on vacation this summer…take this one.

The Rest of It:

*No Spoilers*

I’ve been gushing about this book to everyone I know and the first thing they say is, “I don’t like vampire stories.” To be honest with you, neither do I. However, the vampires in The Passage are not your typical vampires. They are government created super-soldiers gone wrong. Horribly wrong.

What IS typical, is the good vs. evil theme. As readers though, do we ever tire of this? No! We love a good battle and there are plenty of battles fought as these “soldiers” run amok and wreak havoc upon the world as we know it.

Although this book has been compared to Stephen King’s, The Stand, and I did find many similarities between the two novels, I felt that The Passage had a completely different feel to it. It’s a tad more clinical, a bit more mysterious and has more of a futuristic feel to it.

The immense size of this novel has intimidated many readers but don’t let the length fool you. It’s nearly 800 pages but you don’t notice the length at all. Some have mentioned the need for a good editor, that perhaps a few pages could have been shaved off of the final product but honestly, I enjoyed the extra detail and found myself completely absorbed in the world Cronin created.

You may be wondering just how nasty these vamps are. I pictured these creatures as a cross between a human and say…the alien from Aliens. Maybe a tad more bat-like, but definitely something huge and menacing. Yes, there’s a bit of gore as these creatures can be a bit brutal when they do their thing but it wasn’t anything that kept me up at night.

If you like epic novels to sink your teeth into (pun intended), then this might be the book for you. If you enjoy the whole good vs. evil thing, then you will like it more. If you like to feel as if you are in another time and place and that place happens to have creatures with wickedly sharp teeth, then you will love it. I know I did.

If you need a little more convincing, here’s a great BookPage interview with Justin Cronin.

The Passage is book #1 in a trilogy and the next book doesn’t come out until 2012, so read slow.

Source: This review copy was sent to me by the publisher.

Bookish Talk

Fancy That! Genres Through the Ages

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This is my first, official Fancy That! post.

Anyway, I was thinking about the types of books that I used to read when I was younger. When I was in junior high/high school, I read a lot of thrillers. Stephen King was, well…KING. I stayed up all night reading his books. When I ran out of King books, I turned to Dean Koontz. Someone asked me to read Watchers and I loved it. I think I went out and got all of his books after reading that one.

Sometime after that, I turned to historical romance. Yes! Me! Real bodice rippers too. I loved Johanna Lindsey. A friend of mine was a bit older than me and one summer she found herself hooked on them. She’d give me her copies but I also got quite a few of them from the library. I didn’t need sex education in school because these books told me all I needed to know and tossed in some historical stuff as well. Can teens check these types of books out from the library now? They have ratings for movies but not for books. Just wondering. I mean, would a librarian stop a young girl from checking out a book that might be too mature for her?

In college, I was exposed to a lot of different genres. Much of it was required reading but I didn’t care. I loved all of it. At that time, I fell in love with the classics but the genre that I really favored, was dystopian fiction and to this day, this is the genre that I really covet yet I have the hardest time admitting. Why do I have a hard time admitting it? Well, because for many, dystopian = fail. Meaning, that society has crumbled or fallen in upon itself and lots of people see that as depressing. I don’t see it that way at all though.

For me, I love to pick it apart. To see where society failed or better yet, to try to predict when it will fail. Orwell’s 1984 still resonates with readers today because the concept of Big Brother is more relevant now than it was when the book was first written (1949). BUT, when I read it back in college I could see all of that happening. It didn’t seem so far off to me and that’s how it is when I read dystopian fiction today. Volcanoes erupting, pandemics making themselves known, earthquakes…so many earthquakes. I’ve read all this in books, but have you taken a look around lately?

So my question to you is this, do you still love the genres of your youth? I can’t say that I love thrillers anymore even though I do read them every now and then and historical romance hasn’t had my attention since I put it down in the mid-eighties. I guess you could say that I outgrew those genres. What about you? Is there a genre that you used to love that you cannot read now?