The Passage by Justin Cronin

This book starts out like a Michael Crichton thriller: secret government experiments gone awry let loose a disaster of unheard-of proportions on the people of the United States, at a date in the not-too-distant future. Although the novel is definitely of the post-apocalyptic genre, I think its real strength is actually the ensemble cast, who, after a fair amount of scene setting, leave their isolated outpost to try and confront their problems head-on. The disease/vampires/infection themes are nothing new, but in some ways these vampires seems to offer a critique of the Twilight vampires (they glow in the dark instead of sparkling in the sunlight--and like all good [which is to say, bad] vampires, burn when they go out in the sunlight, and their skin changes to become as tough as kevlar)---and there's nothing sentimental or romanticized about these creatures. I was interested, too, in the themes of political critique (the U.S. faces draconian laws imposed by anti-terrorism forces [which blame the vampires on terrorist nations, despite the fact that, as readers quickly learn, the US Army itself conducted the experiments that lead to the original twelve vampires--in a misguided attempt to develop a new super-weapon], and New Orleans has been destroyed by another hurricane, and is now a wasteland of oil drilling) and of the relationship between the vampires and the Global South (the virus is found by a Harvard researcher in Bolivia, where he goes [funded by the US Army] to investigate reports of a virus that cures diseases like cancer). At any rate, the journeys of the characters make this novel intriguing. The dynamics of the plot remind me of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, or The Lord of the Rings. I'm sorry we'll have to wait two years (at least) for the sequel.