Book Bites: The Passengers

The Passengers by John Marrs
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Marrs' The Passengers is an interesting premise squandered by hack writing.

I quit on page 150, which is probably 125 more pages than The Passengers deserved. It smelled like a rejected 'Black Mirror' screenplay hastily adapted into a novel. The book opens with consecutive chapters of characters looking in mirrors so the reader can see their ruddy complexion or their smoky grey eyes. There's a soup of characters who all tend to blend together into flavorless mush. Characters suddenly appear only to die. The narration manufactures false tension by having characters intentionally withhold "terrible secrets" within their own thoughts(!). I'll forgive literary sins in service of a nice thriller, but all added together, The Passengers was too much for me to care.

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