Like an episode of the TV show . . . but with a bigger budget.

by John Passarella, Titan Books

This latest TV tie-in novel takes place during season 7, somewhere between the episodes entitled “Time for a Wedding” and “How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters.”

In it Sam and Dean Winchester, the so-called “hunters” from the hit CW series investigate several bizarre accidents at Laurel Hill in New Jersey. Needless to say there is a supernatural creature causing all the mayhem, which includes anything from a group of parachutists with faulty equipment to a mass pile-up on the highway taken straight from one of those Final Destination movies. The only problem is that for once the two brothers, with their mentor Bobby along for the ride, have no idea whatsoever how to “gank” (kill) the creature in question this time . . .

Why bother buying a tie-in like this when there are loads of fan fic out there on the Internet for free? In a word, professionalism. Passarella’s book is slickly written (although not typo free) and quite the page-turner. It’s like an episode of the TV show, except with a bigger budget: one can easily imagine it being used for the treatment for a big screen effort since it contains a lot of mass disaster movie mayhem one would expect of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It isn’t a perfect read however. Fans will complain that the novel actually spends little time on the two protagonists of Sam and Dean and focuses a lot on some secondary unlikeable characters such as some teenaged juvenile delinquents at a local high school and of course the main villain himself (itself?). The end result is a curiously uninvolving read.

In short
Fans might complain that the book doesn’t focus enough on their heroes, but there is enough widescreen mayhem to make them salivate at the thought of Rite of Passage being turned into a movie. Non-fans need not apply of course.