The Passage

The Passage is a novel by Justin Cronin, published in 2010 by Ballantine Books. It debuted at number three on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list and remained on the list for several weeks afterwards, and it is the first volume of a trilogy.

The book opens with a military project that has been testing a virus on death-row volunteers, and with Amy, a young girl who is placed in the same facility. When the subjects escape, the infection spreads across the United States, and the second half of the novel moves decades forward to a community surviving behind lights that the infected will not cross, with the two halves connected by Amy.

Cronin writes a long, deliberately slow build, with the catastrophe seen from inside the lives of the people caught in it rather than from above, and the novel draws on the vampire tradition while keeping its mechanism scientific. The scale is part of the design: the book spends a long time on the beginning of the disaster before it asks what comes after it.