This is really just in-depth, easy to read, nice and long science fiction. Emphasis on long – we’re talking like 900 pages, and it doesn’t really suit short burst reading. But if your flight is delayed four hours and the Delhi airport is the worst, you can knock out a good long chunk of it and feel pretty good about yourself.
Also apparently the book has been made into a TV show but all I know about it is that the kindle version has two of the TV show cast on the cover and I didn’t recognize either. They made for good facial stand-ins as I read more, though.
Anyway, The Passage. The novel is split between what is roughly the present and what is one hundred years in the future after an event that nearly ended humanity. So we get what lead to the end, and we get how civilization has been fundamentally altered in the interim. There are glimpses of how the world fell apart (spoiler: pretty quickly) but I think it was a smart decision to move swiftly past that. There’s more meat to hang on to when society has done its best to regroup. I also really appreciated an apocalypse book that was a vampire virus rather than a zombie virus, you don’t see many of those.
It’s pretty incredible how action-packed the book manages to be when a massive chunk of it takes place in a survivors’ camp of less than a hundred people, huddled together under near-constant lights. I never found myself particularly drawn to anyone in the large cast of characters, but the story and the action were compelling enough that I realized I didn’t need to be. The size of the book is daunting, but doable.
Oh, for readers like me: I’ve started on the second book and it contains a brief, stylized recap of the first. More books should do this.