A Very Nice Apocalypse- Justin Cronin's "The Passage"

I think I got a heads up on this book from one of those online retailers always trying to read your thoughts. They turned out to be right.

This is a vampire book, but not your namby-pamby Mormon tweener vampires fruitbats or your trailer park vamps or any of those other loser vampires. This is actually cool.

Cronin does characters, let's get that established right away. Some characters don't even have a spoken line in the book and make only a brief appearance but Cronin is able to create a very cogent idea of who this person is and what makes them tick. Or maybe the key is that your imagination is able to take the crumbs he gives you and fill in the rest. I guess it just depends on what kind of crumbs the author throws you.

So while this is a vampire book and an apocalypse story and while there is plenty of action, it is the parts between the action-which is exciting and well-written, also- that treally makes this book shine.

Cronin's narrative is seemless, even when he jumps a century into the future. We step effortlessly from the end of our world (which ends, at least for some with something like a wimper) into a world of the future that remembers us and is clinging to life using the corroded threads of our knowledge and technology. One of the most masterful constructs in "The Passage" is The Colony.

As a viral plague (of vampirism) is wiping out the U.S., starting at a military base in Colorado, California and Texas both secede. California sets up a series of fortified colonies to keep out the "virals," "jumps," "flyers," "smokes," and "dracs," as they are variously known. The Colony is one of those Cali collectives. By A.V. 92 (92 years after the virus) the residents of the Colony have long lost contact with all of the other colonies and believe they might be the last survivors in the world. Cronin provides us with the Colony's "articles of incorporation" and social structure. There is no mistaking that these people are the good guys; they work hard, and they cherish their "Littles" to the point that they hide them in "the santuary" (a former elementary school) until they reach 8-years-old, to prevent them from knowing the true horror of the world until they are past their formative years.

As the title suggests, this is also a story of a voyage, though the titular reference in this case is a bit deceptive. In any Odyssey, Ulysses has got to meet some weirdos. In this case we get creepy collaborators, Texas tough guys, a stray dog, massacre survivors and a whole nation of ghosts. No disappointments there.

The vampires are not completely sentient. They are glowing, superhumanly strong gargoyles, occasionally with shreds of their former identity clinging to their new bodies, like a bunch of rings stuck on the fingers of what was previously an old woman, or a shock of ragged, dyed red hair. Through one major character, we hear their thoughts, which mostly consist of "Who am I?" with fleeting glimpses of the people they once were. So these vamps ain't sexy, but they are oddly sympathetic as well as scary.

And the great thing is, there is so much more going on between the characters; love, rivalry, hatred, grief, loss, hope, it's all there.

I do hope that this isn't the start of a trilogy or something though. It would be like "Stephen King's The Stand II." The story is told here in as complete a fashion as it needs to be told. This is a vampire apocalypse book that is epic in scope and character, with battles, heroes, villains, the works, but it completely avoids becoming pulp (pulp is great, but everything doesn't have to be pulp) fiction of the sort that rehashes the same characters in the same or similar situations over and over. If Mr. Cronin's resume serves as any indicator his next book will be nothing like this one, but then again, with the mad skills he's showing here, if it is a sequel, he may have some new tricks to show us yet..