The Passage (2010)
by Justin Cronin
The year is 2018 and FBI agent Brad Wolgast is tasked with traveling around the United States looking for death row inmates to take part in some secret government experiment. However, when the agency asks Wolgast to bring in a young six year-old orphan named Amy for the program, Wolgast balks but eventually acquiesces, bringing the young girl to a secret facility in Colorado. While there, chaos breaks out and Wolgast soon discovers that the government has been fashioning an new strain of virus that they hoped would prolong life expectancy but instead turns folks into vampire-like beasts who prey on other humans with predator-like animalistic precision. Wolgast and Amy manage to escape, but that's just the start of the story that reads like an epic post-apocalyptic journey across a United States that is in complete shambles.
I picked up this book at the library only because I read some article by Stephen King that recommended it (not that that's really a rousing recommendation anymore after his disappointing opus Under the Dome). However, I really couldn't put The Passage down. The above summary is really only the first 200 pages and then the book changes entirely in a way I don't want to spoil. It's that Psycho-like surprise change in tone that made the book stand out to me.
Cronin has crafted a page-turning thriller here that has me giddily excited that this is part of a proposed trilogy of books. This isn't "LITERATURE" in the way that snotty and snooty folks would look at books, but this is a fun read that is incredibly "readable" thanks to Cronin's manner of writing.
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