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Once upon a time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of researchers who travelled to the jungle of Colombia found a virus which seemed to cause extreme strength and longevity in wild animals. At that time, the secret services thought that this virus would make a difference once purified and applied to US soldiers, and that was when they began to carry out some experiments with human beings: the subjects were prisoners sentenced to death, and even an orphan girl of six, Amy, was inoculated with the virus. But nobody could have known that those who once were men now were able to feed your dreams and control people’s minds. That was how the human race disappeared.
One hundred years later, a small colony of people survive in the middle of nowhere. Three generations before, a group of children were moved there in order to keep them away from the plague of ‘virals’, but so many decades later there is no hope that anybody will ever come to rescue them. There is one thing that keeps them alive: the lights which turn on every night and protect them from the evil beings that are awaiting them in the darkness. And can you imagine what would happen if the lights turn off? You will know soon.
When you re-read a book it is only because you loved it the first time. I was abducted by The passage story the first time I read it; I couldn’t stop reading and, for a week, my life turned only around little Amy and the many theories about her and the other characters that came to my mind at every page. I felt fear, because in this novel of almost one thousand pages a lot of things are told, but the untold is even more disturbing.
There is only one downside: at about three hundred pages the rhythm of the book slows down because a wide range of new characters of the colony are introduced then, and you just aren’t prepared to get separated so abruptly from the previous ones; from Amy and a world that has been extinguished forever. But don’t worry; you will eventually get used to the pace of the colony and you’ll know their main rule: if you fail with your first shot, you die.
Notes:
- Every time I watch the book trailer, it gives me the chills.
- I can’t believe that Cronin’s daughter, a girl of nine, was the one who had the idea of the plot (interview).
- I have re-read it because the second book of the trilogy, The twelve, has just been published in Spain and I wanted to remember everything before reading it. And I’m very happy also because thus I have the review on this blog.
- Book on Goodreads ♦ Book on Amazon.com
From Isi 