It’s all over and I’m standin’ pretty

 

I enjoy post apocalypse fiction. There is something about the society and all its excesses breaking down and mankind being stripped to its bare essentials that appeals to me as a literary trope. The means in which the world ends is simply a MacGuffin, the device that propels the story forward and tells us what happens to mankind when it has to focus solely on survival. The Passage is similar in that regard, though the concept of a viral vampire apocalypse is intriguing. In the end it’s the story of what mankind is when boiled down to its essence.

As with most apocalypse stories, the government is the catalyst. After finding a vampire-like virus carried by Bolivian bats that can greatly extend life, the U.S. Government uses death row inmates as guinea pigs for a top secret military operation known as Project Noah. Things to horribly wrong as they must for this story to continue. A young girl named Amy Harper Bellafonte, who has also been infected with the virus escapes with an FBI agent and lives through the end of the world, also outliving her savior. The story then jumps forward approximately 93 years to a small outpost in California which has been cut off from the rest of the country for decades and encounters Amy by chance. Though they don’t realize it, Amy holds the key to ending the plague that has destroyed most of humanity.

Though this book hit many of the same plot points followed by books like The Stand and Swan Song, it still surprised me in quite a few places. At over 700 pages the book is long but rarely drags. No character is unimportant to the plot. The book ties up many loose ends in the conclusion but still leaves a nice cliffhanger for its sequel.