The transition (novel)

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The transition (English title: The Passage ) is a science fiction - Horror -novel the US writer Justin Cronin and appeared in 2010 in the Goldmann Verlag in the German translation of Rainer Schmidt. The book was at number 13 on the Spiegel bestseller list. It is the first part of the Passage trilogy.

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Six-year-old Amy Harper Bellafonte is kidnapped by two FBI agents and taken to a secret medical testing laboratory, where she is said to be used as a test subject for a dangerous experiment. It's about a mysterious virus that is supposed to make people young and as good as immortal again. To research it, Amy experimented with twelve convicts awaiting the death penalty. However, the mutated men lost their personality, went wild and acquired supernatural mental and physical abilities. They feed on living animals and are sensitive to UV light. In order to eradicate these effects of the virus, a modified form of the pathogen was used, but until then without success. Amy, who is now considered suitable for the experiment, is injected with the infected blood of the first infected, Zero, whereupon she falls into a coma for days. During this time, the virals, as the infected are called, succeed in breaking out of the laboratory, brutally killing anyone who gets in their way. FBI agent Wolgast manages to save Amy and flee with her to a mountain hut in Oregon, where they hide for a while. Wolgast notices changes in the girl: her skin is paler than that of a person. In addition, she feels neither pain nor hunger, ages and no longer sleeps.

With the outbreak of the virals, a new era begins. The virals ravage the surface of the earth; all people who do not kill them infect them with the virus that makes them their own kind. The military uses atomic bombs against the beings. When one of these bombs goes off near Amy and Wolgast's hiding place, Wolgast falls ill from the effects of the radioactive radiation . Amy then follows his advice and flees towards California.

Almost 100 years later, the world has turned into a barren landscape in which there are only a few survivors who take up the fight against the virals. They live in colonies far across the continent, protected by high walls and spotlights. Few of them dare to go out during the day, when the virals hide from the sun, to look for more survivors. On one of these excursions, a group of survivors picks up a girl whose age they estimate is no more than 15 years and brings her to their settlement. At this time, the virals attack the colony. Amy escapes with eight survivors. Together they go in search of the remains of the army. In the further course it seems increasingly clear that Amy is the only one who can still stop the complete downfall of mankind.

criticism

  • “... Not a hastily written horror shocker, but a sophisticated work with sensitively drawn characters. … The way the decay of our world is told here is just terribly creepy. ”- Stern
  • “Maybe Cronin found it again, the Dickens code. In any case, his book is one that works as a beach book and at the same time has astonishing literary quality. It's a skilful combination of Cormac McCarthy's award-winning apocalypse 'The Street' and the blockbuster movie 'Mad Max'. A very tasty mixture, admittedly. ”- FOCUS
  • “'The Transition' is not a small novel, it is more than a thousand pages long, it has been brilliantly discussed and praised by Stephen King as a 'compelling epic'. And it is only the first book in a trilogy about a vampire virus that destroys civilization and spans an entire millennium. ”- Berliner Zeitung

successor

On January 14, 2013, the second part entitled The Twelve was released . The original English version was published in 2012. The third part City of Mirrors was published in May 2016, the German version Die Spiegelstadt followed at the end of October 2016.

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