The Passage

Science fiction

Print length: 977 pagesOrion, 2019

Description

A secret government experiment seeks to turn a virus into a weapon and a source of extended life, using death-row prisoners as test subjects. Its final target is six-year-old Amy Bellafonte, whom FBI agent Brad Wolgast is ordered to collect but instead becomes determined to protect. When the project escapes containment, infected subjects become powerful nocturnal predators and civilization collapses. Nearly a century later, a fortified colony survives behind lights that cannot be allowed to fail, while a generation raised after the disaster knows little of the vanished world. Amy’s continued existence links the experiment to this community’s uncertain future. Blending intimate bonds with post-apocalyptic epic, the novel asks what humanity can preserve when fear, memory, and biological transformation reshape civilization.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Descriptive · Direct

Pace

Variable

Tone

Atmospheric · Dark · Frightening · Tense

Structure

Episodic · Multiple timelines

Focus

Character · Plot · World

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

CommunityFamilyMemoryMortalitySurvivalTransformation

About Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin is an American novelist whose career spans stand-alone fiction and the expansive speculative world of the Passage trilogy. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he taught creative writing at La Salle University and later English at Rice University. His novels include Mary and O’Neil, The Summer Guest, and The Ferryman, but he is best known for The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors, which combine science fiction and horror on an unusually broad scale. Across the trilogy, Cronin balances atmospheric, descriptive writing with direct storytelling, moving among large casts while keeping individual choices central to the collapse and attempted reconstruction of society. His characteristic method is to build speculative catastrophe through institutions, communities, and competing ideas of order rather than through danger alone. The result is fiction attentive both to the machinery of its imagined worlds and to the people trying to preserve ordinary forms of loyalty and responsibility within them.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Orion
Language: English
ISBN: 9781409190981

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