** spoiler alert ** 
 The characters are weak, Cronin is too obsessed with constant cliff-hanger chapters and the end is just too damn open and a bit pointless, considering what happens just a few chapters before it. This thing with the cliff-hangers is mostly annoying because it's a cheap way to generate suspense: make people think something has happened and then a few chapters later return to the same scene and reveal what really happened. What makes it worse is that while the initial scene is very tense and gripping, the revisited scene is rushed and looses all the emotional impact it originally had. This is especially true regarding the fate of one major character. Toward the end, I grew to hate this story-telling technique, especially when Cronin outright stopped explaining why everything seemed to work out for his characters in these super-tense scenes. Seriously, when your half-assed answer is ghosts, and you've never allowed any existence of ghosts anywhere in your narrative, despite your over-wrought religious focus, you are copping out. It felt like a "well, I need something to allow these people to live so ghosts it is." Lazy. 
 That said, I did enjoy the variations on how to tell a story whether through third-person singular, documents, emails and diary passages. I also enjoyed the different take on the vampire mythos, using many of the usual approaches but giving them unique twists. The best part of this book is everything that happens before the vampire outbreak; the rest is very choppy, meandering and requires a HUGE suspension of disbelief at some times that is very sparsely backed. For a book that takes such pains to explain the creation and existence of vampires, there shouldn't be this many ass-pulls.