Justin Cronin’s The Passage was an excellent book. You should definitely read it. A great thrilling scary read, one of my favourite vampire books, which means one of my favourite books.

Never had I looked forward to a sequel more. My excitement increased when I picked up a more recent paperback edition, with a special preview of the The Twelve. Woo-hoo, the sniper we were briefly introduced to in The Passage has his story told – shooting vampires, escaping soldiers, a nightmare journey through an underground car park. This is great, I thought, just like the fat guy in Animal House before the horse dies. Oh, but it wasn’t. It was shit, except for bits, and boring, and annoying. And then came The City of Mirrors, which was also shit, except for bits. (And part of that shit was that after having been teased about the role of Australia in the future, only to find out everyone died and Australia was colonised by Americans who lost their knowledge of everything but still had the University of NSW – I may be slightly wrong on the detail, my copy is in another continent.) Two fat shit books that I have probably read more than many good skinny books, I think because I kept telling myself I must have remembered wrong, they cannot be that bad, BUT THEY WERE. So you should definitely read The Passage, and then mourn the fact that Justin Cronin made so much money from it that he never bothered to write the sequels.

Any way,  so much for 8 year old books.

So, we live in a golden age of television. Its a fact, I should know, I watch enough. You know, all the shows, with their modern approaches to story telling, their realistic setting, their ARTFULNESS. And in this modern age, someone makes this …

As I said, shit. They took the good book and made a crappy cheap looking generic … well, ok its just a trailer, but why is it so clean, and where is the darkness, and the monsters, and the ATMOSPHERE? Has nobody learned anything? And is it just me, or are they actually remaking I Am Legend? – the Will Smith thing, not the excellent book, which again, is one of my favourite vampire books. Where is the creepiness? What, no murdered nuns? No Virals ripping cities apart? Oh, go to buggery …