The Passage fits neatly into the beginning of an era in which the post-apocalyptic story rose in popularity, although it was far from new at that point. Stephen King’s The Stand, to which The Passage owes a debt, is a touchstone of the genre, but it was in the 2010s that end-of-the-world narratives gained mainstream appeal. In 2006, Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, another nightmarish depiction of a future set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. However, there was no clearer example of the genre’s swelling popularity than AMC’s show The Walking Dead, which aired from 2010-2022 and exemplified all the tropes common to post-apocalyptic tales.

The popularity of The Walking Dead resulted in many imitators in TV, cinema, video games, and literature. Fans of The Passage and Justin Cronin have no shortage of other like-minded authors to experience. Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I am Legend has a vampiric threat and inspired two feature films. In 2011, Emily St. John’s novel Station Eleven was published to great acclaim and was also adapted into an HBO series. Walter Miller’s 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz depicts a world like that of the Colony in The Passage, but without vampires.