The Passage: post 2 of many

85% of the way through the book is a far more respectable point at which to review a book. Or so I tell myself, as twinges of guilt twinge my fingers. The Passage. Yes. I am not prone to the heeby jeebies. But I have the heeby jeebies. (Or guilt has found a chink in my very tattered armour.) You know, that sense that someone is in the room watching you. (I promise, they are not. No one has entered my apartment in at least two months.) Yikes. Yes. I said that.

The vampires in The Passage are called Virals (for obvious reasons - we imagine a pathogen is a more plausible explanation than a homicidal maniac or evolutionary cannibal or humanoid with hollow teeth containing venom). (Really, aren't we excusing cretins like Vlad the Impaler and Dexter by suggesting a sudden impulse to kill people is excusable - provided they wear a mouth guard, of course, and have some glimmer of humanity in their eyes - how do you even see that?)

Moving on, crab-style from that rant, because you want to keep these ferals in sight at all times.

One character realises quite soon in the book that if you can see a Viral, you are for all intents and purposes dead, unless you have the reflexes of Clint Eastwood or Jason Bourne. Which is, as it turns out, true. And those who aren't killed by the Virals are killed by their fellow uncontaminated humans, which apocalyptic movies, Vlad the Impaler, war and the tardiness of the UN tell us, too.

These things are like Darkwing Duck but without the duck; Batman without the ridiculous outfit; Riddick without a single chink of humanity in his eyes (the glimmer in his eyes I can see, but I don't think that's humanity). The undead, whose souls presumably dispersed upon death, as generally happens. I hope. The undead moving so fast I can't tell you whether they walk, glide, fly or drop. But you know where they have been. Because these dead people aint ever going to walk again, soul or not.

Are you creeped out? Good. So am I. Because people are still worse.

I am projecting now. This book isn't The Road or Blindness by a long shot. I would slot it onto a shelf next to Wool. There is progressively less horror and philosophy as the protagonists walk the long road, and more human drama. But as you may have noticed, projections of these 'smokes' are snuggled in the rooms around my apartment, watching me. So I am walking around crab-like - metaphorically. Really, I think my walk is more of an amble, as I wander from room to room forgetting why I am there.

I can't tell you what these things represent to me because I have no idea. And as you can imagine, because choosing a brand of coffee is an existential crisis that takes me at least 15 minutes, I have thought long and hard about it. My unconscious is moot on this one. Maybe - and bear with me here - they aren't a metaphor for anything. Maybe they are just awful and my brain can't let chaos be. Maybe I am being unfair, because I want to find that humanity in their eyes, but I can't (partly because someone else wrote this and he's not saying; partly because, seriously, how would one do that?).

There is another reason I am annoyed with this great book: there is a sequel. I imagine the author was halfway through this book and bagged a publisher, who said, let's draw this out so people will pay more because George RR Martin and every other author since JR Tolkien figured that their landscape was broad enough to justify more than 1 000 pages. To which I say, have you read that original trilogy? Tolkien invented new languages and peoples, and wrote detailed back stories that no one who hasn't read Ulysses will ever read.

This great book has plot holes so big you'd need a canoe to cross them. For example (and these aren't spoilers because they smack you in the first ten pages) 100 years after the fall of humanity, people are using original batteries and rifles, and eating canned food. This is a plot hole the size of the one (one of the ones) in The Walking Dead: no one knows what a zombie is. Robert Kirkman (one of the creators) says that there is no zombie literature in Rick's world. Which suggests it is an alternative universe, which opens up another can of worms (as rank as the 100-year-old ones).

The author, Justin Cronin

Whatever excuse the author comes up with - and it will be an excuse - I may not want to canoe that divide, however great this book. My brain wants to expel these Virals from my dusty corners - it wants closure.

The next book is called The Twelve. Again, no spoilers: the title refers to the 12 original Virals, who were developed by the US as a weapon (they have a habit of destroying the world - first the internet, now this). But it's not what you think - just read it - because I am terrible at summarising plots, people. There was a specific sub-plot that was picked out at the beginning of the story, which has petered out, no doubt to appear in the second book, but the main plot is losing momentum now without it. Or maybe not. I am only 85% of the way and maybe the book will dislocate my brain the way The Road did.

Hopefully the smokes will get bored with my reclusiveness and go peeping Tom someone else. Although, do I want them to? And this is why it takes me 30 minutes to make breakfast.

The Passage: post 1

Vampires went out with whatever season of Vampire Diaries and the sparkly My Little Ponies that are the Cullen clan. So hear me out. Spike and Drusilla of Buffy, David and co of Lost Boys, Blade's prey, Dracula of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler of history. These are the John Wicks of the monster world, except their driving force is sexuality. Extended canines like saber-toothed humans (the missing link?), superhuman force and flexibility, the ability to turn into bats (plural, for those who believe in like the conservation of mass), leather jackets, the thirst of an alcoholic in a dry area and the eyes of a feral kitten, to warn us poor women of the dangers of desire. Or encourage us.

Now that we have established what a plastic and a fleshy vampire look like, forget it. Kidding. Bear the conventions of the myth in mind, because My Point (I always have one. Always) rests on it.

Let me draw this out. At the beginning of the world... (I couldn't resist - you are always so serious.) It has been a long time since any work of fiction has given me the heeby jeebies (non-fiction, that is a different story). Blair Witch 2 did the job; so did the aliens on X-Files. I have wanted to 'see' a ghost since I toddled, but no such luck. As I grew up, I realised that mythology was more a wish to see transcendence in the world, and when you think about it, the biology behind photosynthesis and respiration is way more meaningful than things we can't explain. (I hear crickets. Which respire through holes in their exoskeleton FYI.)

I am reading The Passage, which a woman I worked with recommended when she found out I enjoy supernatural horror. How did I not know of this book before?

The characters are a fascinating, eclectic mix. The author commands you to empathise with them, so that you feel every high and low like a blade in your chest. (The author pulls a couple of George RR Martins.) The first section is divided between five (or so) characters. I cried after the first chapter and housed the heeby jeebies after the second. Really. Heeby Jeebies. I kept waking up and listening to the noises outside my door. (My bedroom door leads onto the street, in an area known for its petty crime and student nightlife.) It didn't help that a couple of nights after, someone thought he would wake my neighbour up by banging a stick on the gate outside my window.

If I haven't already driven the point home, the characters are well written: he uses the conventions of horror movies and then turns them slowly like wringing out sodden jeans. Remember, I cried. Cried, my friends.

Can you see how hard I am trying not to drop spoilers? Really, anything more than the characters' names is a spoiler. But I can tell you this:

The vampires are nothing like Dracula and they do not attend high school eternally. They are made, with the hubris of the human race (which is more inexplicable than any supernatural being) from the dregs of human society. They have committed the worst crimes and, because of this, are easy to erase. They are a mix of demon, angel, bat and the big bad witch hiding under your bed and tickling your toes. But because a good author always messes with your head, you feel some affinity with who these undead used to be when they were not dead.

Well, not all of them were dregs. One little girl named Amy, who was abandoned by her prostitute mother, is also chosen to be 'made'. Her past isn't recorded, so it doesn't need to be erased. This also implies that she somehow has also transgressed the laws of human society, by existing, by being the unplanned but unconditionally loved daughter of a prostitute. Her character is intermittently conventional and opaque, and the obstructiveness of the person who is protecting her is ridiculous, but that too is part of the horror genre. (C'mon, how long did it take Jonathan Harker to figure out that his fiance is being stalked by a bat in human form?)

Let me reiterate the heeby jeebies. The vampires are big and bad and if they are under the bed, you have one chance to pull a trigger if you're as quick as Clint Eastwood. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if your will is up to date, because everyone else is dead too. They are darker than the shadows on the floor of your bedroom and brighter than the lamp you light to frighten them away. They leave one in ten people alive but infected, leaking more blood than a bombed blood bank.

Let me reiterate that the characters clutch at your sympathies, so that events that should be moral concrete are made morally ambiguous like spandex. Sitting here writing, I am rooting for a character that I probably shouldn't root for, who is beyond saving and probably was when we met him.

At this point, I must confess, I am only 30% through the book. I am making a habit of this, I know, reviewing books before I finished. Although 30% is pretty extreme. But, see, I can't stop reading it and this hasn't happened since Night Film so I am enjoying the feeling. You should feel chosen that I chose you to share this with. You. Every night I think, maybe I should read something less... heeby jeebyish before I fall asleep. But then I think 'scaredy cat' and I don't care and I want more real vampire.

Hmmm I don't like the way that sounded. These vampires are not sensual. They are perhaps transcendent but they are mostly all the horsemen of the apocalypse and all their understudies and future understudies. They do not represent transgressive female sexuality - or if they do, we are something-ed.

Rather, I want to be scared like a cat facing a vampire, a real vampire, with teeth and claws and the kinds of supernatural powers that make us wonder if they were really here or we just imagined it. I want to be scared into believing that the world out there is better than the world in here. I want to live in a world that is more organised than out here. The Passage gives me all of this, but then points out cracks in both worlds, but this is still more organised than the world out here. Stay tuned.