The Passage is exactly the kind of widely popular fiction that I avoid, the kind that is probably cited as the most recent book read on 3 out of 5 new eHarmony accounts right now. (Well, the ones that acknowledge reading as something people actually do.) I honestly have no idea how it got on my radar in the first place, given that. I guess from a person I know, or NPR? It’s a total blank, I just remember that it got added to my shopping list notepad on the iPhone, and that at the time, I was not shocked, so apparently remembered having added it. My brain works like this far more often than I am comfortable with. Anyway, whatever I had heard was sufficiently convincing, I guess, so I did end up reading it, and really quite early after purchase considering my enormous queue.

But, okay, whatever convinced me was basically right, as the book is at its most basic level a post-apocalyptic overrun-world story, with only a few beacons of huddled humanity in pools of infinite darkness. And I like that setting a lot. As you can perhaps imagine from the title, the people with whom we are concerned don’t just stay huddled under the beacon, but why they go, from whom they are huddled, and what they hope to accomplish are all questions with interesting enough answers that I don’t want to spoil them, except to tease by saying that Amy, introduced in the first sentence of the book as The Girl Who Lived a Thousand Years, is definitely involved. (Every good post-apocalyptic story that isn’t about the actual apocalypse needs a character from Before, to tie the reader to the shattered landscape. Otherwise, it might as well not be set on Earth in the first place!)

So, it has a setting I like and a story I’ve approved of. Why am I not gushing, as I almost certainly too often do? It’s a number of little things that add up to overall dissatisfaction. Like, the perfect record of using “wretch” as a verb. Or the innocent murderer on death row in act one of the story who eventually provided nothing to the plot’s genesis or resolution. Or, and I suppose this is not so little, the overly coincidental coming together of the hero and the plot token just as doom was assured through means unrelated to that doom, without there being some kind of fantastic element or prophecy to justify it.[1] Or the spiritual underpinning throughout the story that never quite gelled for me. Or the sadism of the last sentence of the epilogue. And now it sounds like a story I didn’t like, which isn’t right either. I guess it was a story that I liked a lot, but that had some real need for editing, enough so that I was too often pulled out of the story by it. There is some irony in the fact that I’ve never had this complaint about what are objectively worse books in the Deathlands series.

[1] I am apparently willing to swallow all manner of implausible coincidence, as long as the author tells me that some person wrote it down cryptically generations before.