It’s been quite some time—December 19, in fact—since I said that I had The Passage on my To Be Read table, mainly because I’ve been so flat out writing and then editing The Gathering of the Lost, dealing with earthquakes and their aftermaths, and reading all the Hugo Award fiction finalists ,that everything else has pretty much taken a back seat.

Also, I had heard so much buzz about The Passage that I wanted to allow myself the time to do it justice. This feeling was underscored when I dipped into the first fifty-odd pages and gained the impression that it was definitely a “big” book.

Now that I have finally read it, I can say that while I enjoyed the book overall, I am not quite sure what I really think about it.

Just to give you an idea of the basic story, The Passage is post-apocalyptic, speculative  fiction, of the kind that has been getting some traction with mainstream readers over recent years, eg Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Creyke. In this case, the apocalypse is brought about by a vampire virus, nurtured by military biological weapons’ researchers, that (literally) “breaks out” of the lab. In terms of the basic premise, therefore, I found The Passage similar to both Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and more recently, Mira Grant’s Feed. There were also, I thought, a few nods to Joss Whedon’s long-running Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series: e.g. the Initiative (Series 4), the Anointed child vampire (Series 1 and early 2), and a young woman “watcher” (militia-style soldier) later in the book who has definite “Slayer-esque” qualities.

The time span of The Passage is longer than either World War Z or Feed, being around 90 years, and so the exploration of the effects on society–or in fact, several societies—takes that into account. And there’s a lot of good stuff in that exploration and in the characters that the story follows, as well as the fact that you would definitely not term any of these vampires “sparkly.”  The story being told was definitely interesting as well: no question, this book kept me turning the pages all the way through.

So why do I say that I am not quite sure what I think? Mainly, I suspect, this is because I have so many quibbles that other aspects of the book don’t fully over-ride.  These include early characters who seem important to the unfolding story, and yet simply drop out of the later stages of the book. I particularly note the proto-vampires, Fanning (Zero) and Carter in this respect. There were also elements in the plot that didn’t seem to fit together. For example, in the early stages of the story, Fanning was the Zero, but toward the end the term appeared to refer to Amy. And I was never really clear as to exactly “what” Amy was, as her powers and unqiue character appeared to predate her infection with the vampire virus—but the how/what of that was never addressed. I also had some reservations around character development in the later stages of the book: somehow they just did not seem as convincing or real as in the first, pre-apocalypse section. When, as a reader, I am not sure why characters like/are attracted to each other, and yet they are major point-of-view characters, this detracts from enjoyment of the story, no matter how action packed it may be.

So at the end, I was definitely left with the feeling that this story was unfinished—that there must be another book in the wings that would further explore and develop a lot of these confusing/unfinished elements. And perhaps some of the remaining characters as well.

As appeal to the great oracle of “te web” has indicated that The Passage is indeed the first instalment of an intended trilogy, I can definitely say that I will be reading the forthcoming instalment. Perhaps with a slight sense of reservation and wanting to be convinced still, on some points—but nonetheless, looking forward to the opportunity to read on.

And perhaps the most telling point—despite quibbles and reservations, ever since I finally closed the back cover, I have been thinking about the story and the characters. The Passage, it seems, has staked a claim on the territory of my imagination.