The Passage

Justin Cronin's trilogy begins with a military virus trial that empties America and ends a century later with the last survivors deciding whether the world can be taken back. The first book moves from a near-future thriller to a post-collapse road novel and then to something closer to epic, and the two that follow keep widening the timeframe rather than tightening it. Written on a promise to Cronin's daughter that the heroine would be a girl who saves the world, it is horror in shape but unusually interested in what people rebuild afterwards.