What a slog of a book this was. It was recommended as a tale in the vein of Stephen King's The Stand, one of my all-time favorites by Mr. King. I expected something similar. A tale of a world falling to a pandemic, and the tales of its survivors. What I got was a highly editable story that ends on a frustrating cliffhanger and makes me not want to continue, because...whatever.

There's absolutely nothing going on in huge parts of the book. The action doesn't really begin until about 250 pages in. Instead, we get pages and pages of exposition to characters that die shortly afterwards without leaving any impact on the story. What's the point?

The story picks up a bit once the pandemic (a sort of disease strain from bats that turns people into quasi-vampires) has wiped out most of the population of the US, and we get to meet the inhabitants of the Colony, a walled-in community in the Californian desert, descendants of children who were stuffed into a train by the army to be safe from the attacks of the Virals. Here at least we get to spend more time with the characters, e.g. Peter, the male protagonist for most of the book.

I started skimming after the half-way mark because all too often, you had to look for the thread of the plot swimming in a sea of meaningless exposition.

All in all, it was one of those frustrating books that I wanted to love, and simply couldn't.