Warning: Mild Spoilers Ahead
I know this is meant to be a movie review blog, but I've decided to break from my usual format and talk about a book. This is for two reasons:
One: Most of the movies I've seen recently have just kind of sucked. And not sucked in the way that would be fun to write about. Get Him To The Greek? Meh. It's hard to muster the energy. Even films that I enjoyed, like MacGruber, just don't seem to warrant a lot of discussion. I know I sort of scraped the bottom of the barrel with my Date Night review, so I didn't want to put you guys through that again.
Two: Justin Cronin's new novel The Passage is one of the most incredible books I've ever read.
Anyone who has ever heard me talk for more than five minutes probably knows that Stephen King's The Stand is my favorite novel of all time, and that I treat it nearly as a religion. It looms over its next closest competitor, Thomas M. Disch's equally apocalyptic The M.D. like the Sears Tower over the surrounding Chicago skyline. What makes both of these novels so great -- beyond the artfulness of the writing, the breadth of the characters, and the expansiveness of the authors' respective visions -- is the fact that both King and Disch used the basics of a horror story setup as a springboard to tell a much larger story, as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.
To reduce either of these books to the label of "horror" is sort of like saying The White Album is a pretty good rock-and-roll record.
As someone who's been reading horror fiction seriously for more than two decades, I've never come across another novel that even approaches either of these masterpieces. So you'll understand how disconcerting it was for me when, about halfway through, I realized that The Passage might not just come close, but could actually sprint right on past like that South African runner whom everyone thinks is really a dude. In the end, it didn't. Not quite. But it sure made a race out of it.
To sum this thing up in a couple paragraphs would be a grave injustice to what Cronin has done here. Like any fantasy story, the plot -- when boiled down to its barest elements -- can't help but sound kind of goofy. So take this synopsis for what it is.
The story starts in the very near future (it's never exactly said when, but I'm guessing around 2018) with Amy Harper Bellafonte, the six-year-old daughter of a homeless prostitute named Jeanette. Once upon a time Jeanette was a waitress at a roadside diner in Iowa who fell for the dubious charms of a traveling salesman. He's described thusly:
"Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way. When she told her father what had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn’t say was that Bill Reynolds was married, a married man; he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He’d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man was that had done this to her, she didn’t say. She didn’t even tell him the man’s name."
This is right on the first page. There's nary a vampire in sight.
What this should tell you is that Cronin's a real writer, possessing an artful grasp of language and a deft touch with the little details (“leather seats like creamy butter”) that make the characters, the environment, and the situation come alive on the page. I love horror fiction, but you just don't find writing like this that often.
Six years later, Jeanette's on the skids (Cronin very sensitively walks us through how a basically good person can end up in such desperate straits after a series of bad but understandable choices). Following a terrible night that ends with Jeanette killing one of her johns in self defense, she throws in the towel on even trying to be a mother, has Amy pack up her things in her battered Powerpuff Girls backpack, and drops her off at a Memphis convent before hitting the road.
Meanwhile, an FBI special agent named Wolgast has been traversing the country, gathering up death row inmates and spiriting them away to a top secret military compound high in the Colorado mountains, where a mad virologist named Jonah Lear and a shady special ops agent named Richards are working on an experiment dubbed Project NOAH. On an expedition into the darkest heart of the Bolivian jungle, Lear discovered a virus that reactivates the dormant thalmus gland, possibly unlocking the key to eternal life. The inmates are to be used as human guinea pigs, and they (known, somewhat religiously, as the Twelve) are transformed into a cadre of super strong vampiric mutants that glow in the dark and can rip rabbits (or humans) apart with their razor sharp teeth.
Lear requests a child -- preferably an orphan -- for the next phase of his experiment. Wolgast retrieves Amy from the convent, but can’t bring herself to take her to the compound. They hit the road. Richards mobilizes his thugs to find them. Long story short, Wolgast is thrown in a cell, Amy is injected with the virus, the Twelve mount a bloody escape, and the world comes crashing to an end.
Ninety-two years later, what may be the last remnants of the uninfected human population have established a small, straggly colony in the mountains east of Los Angeles. Their existence is brutal, and they survive only through vigilance, ingenuity, and the use of century-old military technology that keeps the huge floodlights lit at night and the creatures (called variously virals, smokes, or dracs) at bay.
One day a girl, maybe 16 and strangely impervious to injury or illness, wanders into the colony. She’s the first "Walker" anyone has seen in years. She has a microchip and radio beacon buried in her neck. The information on the microchip suggests that she's at least a century old.
The beacon leads to a repeating signal somewhere in the Colorado mountains: "If you find her, bring her here."
Thus sets the stage for an an epic, cross-country quest every bit as gripping and terrifying as Frodo's journey across Mordor.
Cronin is a pedigreed literary novelist (he has the awards, the job in academia, and the low book sales to prove it), and his dive into genre waters has brought with it considerable hype. Anyone who has followed the press knows the (too cute by half) story of The Passage’s birth: Cronin's 9-year-old daughter expressed her concern to him that his previous books weren't "interesting enough," and requested that he write something about a little girl who saves the world. Indulging her as she tagged along with him on his daily jogs, he played a "Design-a-Novel" game with her, shooting ideas back and forth and building out the story from the ground up. When winter fell and the jogs stopped, he realized he had something.
"Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl," he said in an interview, "and she was the girl I wanted to impress."
Gag. Like I said, too cute by half. But whatever. What matters is that Cronin has brought his considerable literary talents to bare here, building a world that feels fully realized and characters that exist with all the depth, complexity, and contradictions of real people. The Passage reads like a horror novel written by a guy who doesn't really know the genre. This could have lead to something woefully pretentious and even insulting to horror fans, but in Cronin's hands it becomes one of the book's greatest strengths. Characters like Wolgast, Sister Lacey at the convent, and Amy herself could have easily slipped into stock archetypes, but Cronin finds their humanity and draws it forth from the pages like a dowser drawing water from rocky soil.
The first third of the novel concerns the setup that leads to disaster, and Cronin wisely takes his time with it, establishing a world much like ours but just a few years more corrupt. The U.S. continues to be mired in neverending wars. The government has limited interstate travel and has turned the country into a vast surveillance state. Most disturbingly -- considering what's going on right now -- New Orleans has been depopulated and declared a Federal Petrochemical Zone (the only thing still in operation there are the oil wells) and the Gulf of Mexico has become an acrid waste.
Wolgast is a cog in this corrupt machine, diligently doing his job and trying to forget the dead child and angry ex wife he has left behind. But when he is told to bring Amy in, the last sliver of his humanity rebels. The bond that grows between the bitter agent and the little girl in his custody is truly touching without being sappy and leads – many pages later -- to a heartbreaking conclusion.
Cronin also wisely ellipses the time between the escape of the Twelve and the grim future that lies a century hence. He gives us snippets of our world's collapse (the infection spreading like cancer outward from Colorado, the military bombing the cities in an attempt to contain the virus, California and Texas seceding from the country in a last-ditch bid to defend themselves), but he doesn't dwell on it. This is a smart move, because anything he came up with would have been a tired retread of what King did in The Stand 30 years ago.
Instead, he gives us Auntie Jaxon, an old woman who was a little girl at the time of the collapse, and her reminiscences of being shuttled across the country in a train full of children to the hastily constructed compound that becomes the First Colony. There's something endearing about Cronin's notion of a group of largely abandoned children somehow providing the seeds of a new civilization. When Cronin picks up the narrative again, Auntie is an ancient and her great-great nephew, Peter Jaxon -- a young man charged with maintaining the Watch (manning the compound's battlements and looking for any sign of the virals) -- becomes the central character.
Like Project NOAH and Amy's life during the Time Before, Cronin renders existence in the Colony with exquisite detail. The new cast of characters (including Peter's troubled brother Theo and Lish, the militaristic orphan who mans the battlements with Peter and who may or may not be in love with him) come roaring to life. We grow comfortable in the First Colony, start feeling at home there with the many Jaxons, Fischers, Patels and Chous, and when things inevitably come apart at the seams (precipitated by Amy's mysterious arrival and a plague of nightmares that may not just be dreams) we feel the tragedy of the Colony’s undoing as acutely as we do the collapse of our own world. When Peter, Lish and others hit the road with Amy for the arduous journey to Colorado, we can feel their loss of the only home they ever knew.
It's during this journey -- in the final third of the book – where Cronin begins to struggle with the material. His prose becomes ever so slightly more overwrought, and he resorts more and more to "fate" (less charitably "coincidence," and even less so "narrative convenience") to propel the story forward. When our characters find themselves in an apparent haven (actually called "The Haven") of survivors in southern Nevada, Cronin overplays his hand a little, telegraphing too soon the truth of this place that seems too good to be true, thereby sapping the power from the final revelation of what The Haven is all about. It was only in these pages that I began to grow impatient with the story.
But he recovers nicely. As the characters move into Colorado, he throws some unexpected curveballs and delivers a powerful climax before giving us an open-ended conclusion that manages to be heartfelt without sinking too deeply into the saccharine.
He then delivers a sucker punch on the last page that will literally take your breath away. Thank God this is supposed to be the first in a series, because I'm almost literally dying to know what happens next.
Cronin has been widely praised (most notably by King himself) for putting the scare back into the vampire story. But this isn't really his goal. Parts of the book are inarguably very frightening, and Cronin displays a Hitchcockian knack for building suspense. But the overarching tone of the book is one of deep, aching sadness (I'd suggest listening to, as I did, The National's High Violet while you read it. If there has ever been a better marriage between album and novel, I don't know what it is). The virals themselves barely resemble vampires as we know them, and Cronin impressively balances the terror at what they are and what they can do with the tragedy of who they were.
As someone who still daydreams about someday writing the perfect horror novel, it would be easy to resent Cronin for this book. Here's this literary douchebag who wandered into MY genre after goofing around with his daughter and managed to write perhaps the best horror novel in two decades. And he makes it look pretty damn easy.
Asshole.
But in the end I'm grateful for this book. If you're a horror fan -- or just a fan of good writing that can sweep you away -- you will be too.
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