Review of speculative fiction novel, Passage by Connie Willis

Passage
Connie Willis
Voyager Books
ISBN: 0-00-711825-2

Psychologist Dr. Joanna Lander has spent the last two years at Mercy Hospital studying those patients who have "died" and come back, those who have had a near death experience, or NDE.

She isn't the only one, the hospital corridors are also haunted by a spiritualist, and Joanna suspects, fraud. He is convinced that the NDE's are totally spiritual, is it coincidence that he also writes books with such titles as The Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Joanna thinks that NDE's might be caused by chemical reactions as the brain dies, or maybe it's some type of survivial mechanism, and when Dr. Richard Wright asks her to become part of his scientific study, where he can induce NDEs with chemicals, Joanna jumps at the chance.

Volunteers and funding soon dry up, and Joanna becomes the guinea pig herself, feeling a sense of wonder that she will get to experience what she's been hearing second-hand.

But although Joanna expereinces what most people have reported, the light, the tunnel, she discovers something else as well. A part of her knows why everything seems so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid...

Every so often a book a book comes along and just sweeps you up and you forget everything else in your quest to finish it. Passage is such a book, it is a fairly long book, but it only took me two days to finish it, I needed to see the next part.

Ms. Willis has the knack of leaving something hanging at the end of each chapter, and you have no option but to read on to discover what is going to happen next. You cared about the characters and needed to know what adventures they were going to get into next.

A book you may not want to put down.

Reviewed by Annette Gisby, author of Silent Screams, Shadows of the Rose and Drowning Rapunzel.