Justin Cronin's "The Passage"

[joysilence]

I recently asked my bloke to pick me up a horror novel while he was at the supermarket (yes, I am personally responsible for the decline of Britain's small second-hand bookshops) and he came home with Justin Cronin's much-vaunted vampire apocalypse novel The Passage, marketed at a suspicious £10 for a splendid hardback edition complete with iridiscent shiny cover. I expect most of you have heard about this novel - apparently Stephen King phoned in to some show where Cronin was a guest and held forth at length about what a classic it was. Obviously, King recommends everything nowadays, but my interest was still piqued by a couple of very favourable broadsheet reviews. It is, after all, still quite rare for a respected "literary" author like Cronin to branch into horror, so I wanted to see what he would make of it.

I'm afraid I don't think The Passage is an unqualified success, and it's no kind of classic. This is a shame, as the first part of the book is extremely promising. We follow Special Agent Wolgast, who has been given the task of recruiting guinea-pigs from among the nation's Death Row inmates for a sinister military experiment commandeered by a sciencejerk called Lear. Lear and a deranged military chap have come up with a jolly wheeze involving men being turned into vampires to serve in the Army as the Ultimate Fighting Machine. Naturally, everything goes wrong and global catastrophe results, but not before Wolgast's destiny has intersected with that of a psychic Nigerian Nun and a little girl called Amy, who Wolgast is forced to kidnap so she can be used as Lear's final experiment.

( If You Seek Amy )

To summarise, although it's far from being completely worthless, I would only recommend The Passage to fans of apocalyptic fiction. It hardly reads as a horror novel at all, and there are some obvious flaws that I didn't expect from a prize-winning author.