The Passage

“She believed that this was how the world felt to most people, even those closest to her, her parents and sisters and friends at school; they lived their whole lives in a prison of drab silence, a world without a voice. Knowing this made her so sad that sometimes she couldn’t stop crying for days.”

Lacey has few memories of not hearing God’s voice. During God’s infrequent withdrawals, she empathizes with people who can’t hear God’s voice, which breaks her heart. However, after Lear’s death, she describes her existence as lonely, despite the presence of God. Lacey needs human contact as much as anyone.

“The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand years more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards.”

Richards remembers his excitement following the 9/11 attacks. They set the course for humanity’s new relationship with war, which was only a renewal of an ancient war. Richards’s worldview is hostile, xenophobic, and contingent on striking first. War, abhorrent to most, gives him a chance to distinguish himself.

“Wasn’t there something about them that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness—what if these things weren’t fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal?”

Richards is not as uncomfortable with the idea of vampires as others. He thinks vampires would be a manifestation of traits and appetites that humans already possess but amplified. Those who feel horror at vampires do not see themselves in them. The viewing of Dracula late in the novel reinforces this, when the soldiers mock Bela Lugosi’s vampire.