The Passage (The Passage, #1) by Justin Cronin
1.0 Stars
1-1-2015
This book has major flaws. The first and unforgivable flaw is that from page 100 on, every POV character is being mind controlled by vampires. (Spoiler!) It is like this endless un-skippable cut scene, where none of the characters show any agency or awareness what so ever. Well, let me amend that. There is one character who has some mindfulness and resistance to subversion, but apparently he is a villain, and so gets killed off early. In general this reminded me of reading _The Ruins_, where half way through the book all the characters are irredeemably fucked, and you are just wondering why the other half of the book could possibly be needed. Which brings us to major flaw #2, the inordinate length of the book. The author needs to explain in detail the history of every little side character and event, making the story vastly, vassssstly longer than it needed to be. This compounds flaw #1. Actually, as a short story this could have been fine, and the internal justifications for carrying out the vampire's telepathic commands could have been interesting for the length of the story. After 800 pages though, this sort of thing just becomes terrible.
Sidenote:
One of the downsides of eBooks is that you can inadvertently pick up a giant tome like this. On a whim you start to read, and hours later you are only a third of the way through. Ughh.