Glory, thanks. I keep wavering about this book so – perverse as it sounds – I’m glad to hear negative comments. 
Haven’t read this book, but the current issue of *Entertainment Weekly *notes that The Passage is heading to Holleywood–supposedly the movie will be directed by Ridley Scott.
I’m still struggling through this book. I’m about 450 pages in…
Flyers, but this author goes on and on and on…and on and on.
I sure wish I was reading the book all the reviewers apparently read. They book they describe sounds like a blast!
I just finished it. Man, did the author wimp out at the ending. I mean, action scenes, blood and guts, horror, the innocent slaughtered and then
Two of the main characters get a miraculous salavation, apparently at the hands of the GHOST of someone who used to live in house? Fucking flyers, indeed.
I’m with those who hated the lashing of metaphysical crap, and there are deadly dull stretches throughout the book, a couple lasting for over a hundred pages at a time.
It’s kind of sad: I liked Stephen King until he got bitten by the bug of wanting to be recognized as a ‘literary’ writer, and his books bloated painfully. This guy apparently started as a literary writer who wanted to become Stephen King. The hybrid going the other way isn’t any better, IMHO.
I’m in the first quarter of The Passage, and haven’t been able to put it down all day. I have a sunburn to prove it. It’s scary and yet has some real literary merit, I think. The plot is galloping along at a good pace. It’s sure got some sadness to it.
I’m at the part where Amy and Wolgast are at the cabin in Oregon and have just seen what is probably a nuke going off in the distance. (Spoiler text because I like it when people hide spoiler points to read/not read as one sees fit.)
I am engrossed in the book!
I got about 180 pages in. Got distracted by other things, read another book. Went back and discovered that I just didn’t care at all.
After reading “The City and the City” and now in the middle of “Kraken” by China Mieville, I find that “The Passage” just doesn’t compare.
I kind of thought it was the Wolgast vampire that saved them.
I enjoyed the book. The “flyers” thing was kind of annoying and the first few times they said it I thought it was another character’s name or something. I took a break from a rather dry historical book on the Reformation to read this, so it seemed rather fast paced by comparison. Admittedly I think there were still parts that I skimmed over to get back to the action.
Ah, so this thread pretty much answers the question I’ve been asking myself. I really liked the part of the book that was much like World War Z in style, not so much the part I’m slogging through now which feels like the world of The Giver but with a “vampire” threat. I was hoping it would speed back up and get less deliberately obfuscatively dully paced. Action is happening, but I kind of don’t care because of all the crappy slow pacing, then action mentioned in summation and seemingly skimmed over, it’s just choppy. He takes his sweet time to go back in and fill in the details of what, why, how and his characters are so perversely flat I don’t care about the who.
And then I found out it’s just part one of a trilogy so I have little hope that it will ever speed the action up and return to a more interesting flow. There’s only so much talking, “dreaminess” and wandering around a compound for page after page that I’ll put up with. Part f the problem may be that I’m reading it with the Kindle app on my phone which drags it out a bit–with a book in the hand skimming is easier and quicker so you don’t get so bogged down in annoying stylistic devices.
So given how I’m feeling about it now and I’m only at the part where
The guard with a crush on Soo has killed her and some other guards (“The Night of the Knives?” or somesuch) should I bother? Does he knock off the “dreamy” passages and move the action along with actual present tense action sequences instead of “that night, many people would remember…” sort of nonsense that renders exciting gore-filled action (people being unzipped like children’s snowsuits?! How can that be boring!? But somehow he manages it.) into dull-eyed recounting of the dry facts of who died and where.
I just finished this this weekend and, in my opinion, it gets even worse. The mystic improbability gets ratcheted to new heights while the pages of boring description just go on and on. And Cronin sets up the next two books to be more of the same.
I think this is the book that is finally making me say “ENOUGH VAMPIRE STORIES ALREADY!”
Mark me down as someone who really enjoyed The Passage. I liked the structure of it, with the 3rd Annual Conference on Human Conflict or something or other (don’t have the book in front of me) being held in 1000 A.V., and the ending being taken from a diary found in the ruins of the Roswell Massacre. I didn’t mind the details and descriptions that others seemed to find so boring - it gave me a more vivid background in which to imagine the actions.
I also enjoyed The Strain when it came out, and now I’m impatient for the other books in both trilogies.
That whole section is about over. I nearly didn’t make it through that. Things tighten up and start moving from then on. It never really reaches the height’s of the first section, but it does swing back up and keep on a fairly strong pace from that point.
Just finished it - I liked it just fine. It wasn’t “I have to stay up all night and keep reading” like The Stand, but a good, solid PA novel.
It was all right. I picked it up at the store a few months ago without having heard any hype about it - somehow I managed to avoid all that until I was done reading the book. I found the premise fascinating and there were bits of the book that drew me in, but often I found myself skimming impatiently until something actually happened.
I’ll read the next book when it comes out, anyway.
Man, you guys need to read more textbooks or something - I didn’t find any parts of the book where it was so boring I couldn’t slog through.
I’ve put a hold on “The Strain” now, and also “World War Z” - gettin’ my PA fiction on.
I finally finished The Passage tonight. Good christ was that a slog!
I mean, I enjoyed it, but you could have easily snipped 200 pages out of that mess and made a much snappier book. Whole chapters from the First Colony section could have been pulled out and the book would have been no worse for the wear.
And the way people kept “coming back to life” from 100 years ago (or even just being saved at the last minute, only for their survival to be explained six chapters later) was driving me batty.
I’ll probably pick up the next part when it’s released. Word is Cronin is going to take two years between entries, so perhaps I’ll forget all of the crap parts and be really excited for The Passage 2 in 2012. I probably should hate it more considering all of the errors it contains. One in particular stuck with me through the whole book. After the first vampire attack at the mall in the First Colony section, a trio of vampires runs across an open parking lot in the middle of the day. Every other part of the book says this is impossible, so I guess Cronin just messed up. With mistakes like that happening every few chapters, this was definitely not the book the reviewers read.
Just finished. Realized today that it’s actually Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows set in the US…
The protagonists go on a mysterious wilderness journey, poorly prepared and supplied, with unspeakable evil likely to suddenly attack them at any moment. In the end the hero leaves his friends to face his doom unarmed, discovering ultimate answers to the questions that bedeviled him.