The Passage by Justin Cronin

6 year old Amy is abandoned by her desperate mother with a group of nuns after killing a trick who was taking her to a fraternity house.  Deep in the mountains of Colorado army scientists are trialling use of a virus found in the jungles of Columbia to create supersoldiers of immense strength, bloodthirstiness and longevity, vampires in all but name.  After 12 subjects the scientists want a new subject, they want Amy, and after treatment she becomes something new.  Inevitably the worst happens, the 12 get loose and turn everyone they bite into one of them, 'smokes', 'virals' or 'dracs'.  The United States turns apocalyptic.

Move forward a century, Peter lives in a fortified community, he has never seen the stars because at night floodlights are switched on all round the perimiter to keep the smokes at bay.  He is one of the Watch and is waiting for the return of his brother, taken up by the smokes on a visit to the generators.  For some reason, the smokes always come home.

This could have been a brilliant dystopia, it has elements of Shymalan's 'The Village' and good post apocalyptic novels but the characters aren't well deliniated, apart from Amy and ex-nun Lacey they all blended together for me.  There are too many cliches, vampires rule the world and humans become just meat, mad scientists ruin the world, etc etc.  Disappointing ultimately

POST APOCALYTIC #1
The Postman by David Brin

A fascinating page turner of a book with lots of great ideas but not terribly well written to my mind.  The population of the United States has been decimated by climate shift, disease and bands of insane survivalists.  Gordon Krantz, a lone survivor living a subsistence level existence in the hills of Oregon, is set upon and robbed of all his possessions by a band of men.  He finds the ruined remains of a jeep with a postman inside and takes the clothes, and the role of postman, and becomes an unwilling extraordinary symbol of hope in a particularly dark age.