Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” trilogy reminds me of DC’s comic book movies: the premise is great, but each new installment is grittier, darker and makes less sense than the one before it.
I’ll start with a warning: if you have any sort of trauma-related emotional triggers, the first 60 pages of “The city of mirrors” will pull them, seemingly just for the fun of it. In the very first chapters of the book, we encounter (in no particular order) a stillbirth, a series of rape-related flashbacks, a man telepathically cheating on his girlfriend, a sexually abused little girl, and a religious hermit who goes to wander in the desert and then either gets extremely lucky by finding a bona fide treasure or loots an emergency supply station while presumably leaving the next stranded traveler to die.
I honestly can’t tell why Cronin chose to assault his readers like this. It’s possible that he tried to shove as much potential shock value as possible to make the book more memorable (though not in a good way) – at one point in the book, there’s a fairly detailed description of live birth. (Not quite what one expects in what’s supposed to be a vampire book.) On the other hand, it’s possible he was just trying to pad the page count. “The city of mirrors” appears to be the shortest book in the trilogy, and that’s after all the shameless padding and all the hundreds of pages spent describing nothing in general.
In the middle of the book, there’s a 200-page novel in which Zero, the original viral, corners one of our plucky heroes and shares his origin story in a very unexpected, out-of-context way. Is it possible that Cronin always wanted to write a “coming of age” story and decided to force-feed it to his readers? Or was it just something gathering dust in his desk drawer that seemed good enough to turn a 400-page book into a heavy 600-pager?
Regardless, the notion of a 150-year-old vampire moaning about his lost college girlfriend is ridiculous, especially considering that his audience consists of a single person who grew up with only the most basic education and who wouldn’t be able to grasp even the most basic concepts – things like tenure or airplanes or upper-class socioeconomic class. The story would have been much more realistic and fun if Zero would have to stop every 5 minutes and explain what things meant, but nope, we’re all subjected to a ridiculously out-of-place stream of consciousness. (Can you imagine tracking down a rural bumpkin from the year 1900 and telling them about your computer problems? Yeah, it’s *that* ridiculous.)
I might have been able to overlook all of the above and give the book a weak 4-star rating, but there are far too many plot holes and, dare I say, poor writing for a book that’s been in the works for 4 years. Just a handful of examples off the top of my head… A 35-year-old horse can run as fast as a group of virals. A character goes for a long swim and produces a perfectly dry book of matches from their pocket. A deaf person devises their own sign language – so advanced that even “War and peace” can be translated into it. Automatic rifles last just fine for 120 years before suddenly starting to break down due to advanced age. Two people that discover potentially world-ending piece of news choose not to tell everyone but instead launch a sociopathic murderous cult that involves dozens of people over the course of 21 years, none of whom say a word to anybody. (Every spy agency’s dream!) A person that’s never been on a boat learns how to operate a cruise ship in less than a month. People of the future can’t tell the difference between 870 and 1,000 years. After restarting civilization, 870 years later the pinnacle of their technological achievement is dirigibles and flashbulb cameras. (Must have been all the inbreeding.) Virals discover brand new powers that can’t be explained by any virus and turn into shapeshifters. Half the characters in the book develop superpowers – either telepathic abilities that are ever so convenient, or the ability to run for 30 minutes while bleeding from an artery without any lasting damage.
If I sound just a little bit upset, it’s because I’ve spent 2 weeks of my life struggling to finish this book, waiting for a payoff at the end, but it never came. I downgrade the book to 2 stars for the most ridiculously stretched-out ending I have ever had the displeasure to read. It’s yet another novella about people we don’t know, doing things we don’t care about, who end up lecturing us about the things we already know and, in the end, do something so extremely stupid (but pretty and sentimental – yay!) that the entire struggle appears to have been for naught.
On the upside, the language of the book is occasionally moving and often beautiful. That is, of course, when it’s not talking about child rape, stillbirths, murderous cults, shapeshifting vampires, shapeshifting humans, shapeshifting vampires that become humans or shapeshifting humans that become vampires but then change their minds and switch back to being humans.
I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.
Pre-order it on Amazon here, if you’re so inclined. (Release date: May 24, 2016)
Full disclosure: I’ve received the advanced reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Grigory Lukin.com 