The reviews are in on Rice professor Justin Cronin's new 770-page thriller, The Passage, which has garnered much attention for its $3.75 million book deal and subsequent bidding war between Hollywood studios for a film adaptation.

The write-ups are nearly unanimous in their praise for the post-apocalyptic epic. Janet Maslin of The New York Times calls The Passage a "genuinely jolting horror story" with its "share of original twists" that lend it the "air of an old-time western."

The most rave review comes from Laura Miller of Salon, which has picked up the book as the first installment of its new online book club.

"Cronin just gets it right; the combination of attentive realism and doomsday stakes makes for a mesmerizing experience," she writes, adding, "He writes quietly refined sentences and can incise all the finer details of character that make a fictional person seem like someone you'd actually know instead of merely a representative Cop or Scientist or Lawyer."

Both The New York Times and Salon admit that the book is not without its pop aspects, as Maslin compares the setting to that of a video game and "as apt to move in linear fashion from one realm to another." Miller recognizes that the plot has the "typical furniture of paranoid science fiction sagas like The X-Files, adding, "Clichés and stereotypical characters are instantly legible; they make for what people like to call a 'fast read.'"

Because of the sheer amount of page numbers, Maslin describes the volume as "long (and) arid." What's more, the protracted plot will be drawn out over two more novels in the trilogy.

Despite the hints of pop sci-fi genre writing, the reviews still attest to the quality of Cronin's storytelling, as Salon suggests that the plot is "always conveyed with those extra grace notes of personality and place too rarely found in genre fiction."

The reviews follow the book's preview articles in their comparisons to fellow thriller scribe, Stephen King. Yet Miller argues that Cronin is more understated and often more thoughtful: "King's characters tend to be driven by one or two major desires, fears or traits, while Cronin's people are full of contradictions and surprises," she writes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is that intellectual beast, National Public Radio, whose book critic Alan Cheuse has labeled The Passage "the biggest disappointment" of the season, a "multimillion-dollar clunker."

Cheuse explains to his listeners, "I just wanted to tell you that I wasn't at all sorry when this one was over," as he accuses the book of being no more than a vampire novel. Salon attempts to justify the vampire-stigma, as Miller writes, "And, yes, there are vampires, although they're semiconscious beasts, a far cry from the suave, politicking predators of True Blood or the immortal dreamboats of Twilight."

Houston-based book critic Ed Nawotka takes on the book in the Dallas Morning News, mostly with praise, and points out the important place Houston possesses in the book's disaster dialogue:

Better yet, the name of the post-catastrophe refugee city is First Colony. Is Cronin making a jab at Sugar Land's flagship master-planned community? We hope so.

(Read CultureMap's exclusive interview with Cronin, here.)