The Passage

The Passage
by Justin Cronin

Update for Collectors:
The signed editions sold out within FOUR hours of being officially announced and we shut down the Waiting List after nearly 500 people signed up.

About the Book:
"It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he's done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered the apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

Note from the Publisher:
In January, The Wall Street Journal named The Passage by Justin Cronin as one of the top books that'll be published this year, and the writing has been compared to the works of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Margaret Atwood, among others. In fact, Stephen King was so impressed with the novel that he mentioned it in his Best Books of 2009 column in Entertainment Weekly even though it wasn't even published yet: "One that doesn't appear here is Justin Cronin's forthcoming novel, The Passage. This epic vampire novel won't be out until summer 2010, but you'll want to mark your calendar. Take it from Uncle Stevie, this is your basic don't-miss reading experience."

Special Features Exclusive to this Collector's Edition:
• epic cover artwork by Tomislav Tikulin
• black & white interior artwork by Jill Bauman
• special afterword by the author detailing why he wrote the book
• incredible photo gallery of research trips the author took for the book (including notes from the author discussing his inspiration for key scenes)
• map of a key location hand drawn by the author
• deluxe oversized design
• extremely collectible print run that is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of copies of the edition you'll see in bookstores — and you will NOT see our edition in chain bookstores!

" The monsters in this compulsive nail biter are the scariest in fiction since Stephen King's vampires in 'Salem's Lot...This exceptional thriller should be one of the most popular novels this year and will draw in readers everywhere."
— Library Journal, starred review

" Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin’s engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America...[Cronin] manages to engage the reader with a sweeping epic style."
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

"One that doesn't appear here is Justin Cronin's forthcoming novel, The Passage. This epic vampire novel won't be out until summer 2010, but you'll want to mark your calendar. Take it from Uncle Stevie, this is your basic don't-miss reading experience."
— Stephen King

Born and raised in New England, Justin Cronin is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Awards for his fiction include the Stephen Crane Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his wife and children in Houston, Texas.

His many travels in life inspired his acclaimed novel, The Passage: "Many of the major locations in the novel are, in fact, places I have lived. Except for a long stint in Philadelphia, and now Houston, my life has been a bit nomadic. I was raised in the Northeast, but after college, I ping-ponged all over the country for a while. In some ways, shaking off my strictly Northeastern point of view has been the central project of my adult life. This gave me not only a sense of the sheer immensity of the continent, but also the great diversity of its textures, both geographical and cultural, and I wanted the book to capture this feeling of vastness, especially when the narrative jumps forward a hundred years and the continent has become depopulated. One of the most striking impressions of my travels across the country is how empty a lot of it is. You can pull off the road in Kansas or Nevada or Utah or Texas and stand in the quiet with only the wind for company and it seems as if civilization has already ended, that you’re all alone on the planet. It’s a wonderful and a terrifying feeling at the same time, and while I was writing the book, I decided I would travel every mile my characters did, in order to capture not only the details of place, but the feeling of place."

His first Cemetery Dance Publications deluxe Limited Edition was The Passage, which sold out within four hours of being announced.

Published in two states:
• Deluxe Oversized Hardcover Limited Edition of 948 signed and hand-numbered copies bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn with a satin ribbon page marker and featuring a full-color signature sheet ($75)
• Deluxe Traycased Hardcover Lettered Edition of 52 signed and hand-lettered copies bound in leather and Smyth sewn with a satin ribbon page marker and a full-color signature sheet, housed in a deluxe traycase with a pullout ribbon ($500)

Artwork... coming soon