There are no rules

I'm on an interesting reading binge right now, which started with the second book in Game of Thrones series and then moved to The Passage.

I'm loving the Passage, to the point where there have been evenings when I should have been sleeping and instead, I've been reading compulsively. What the book does really, really well is create sympathy for the main characters, you really, really care about them and how they survive the catastrophic happenings in the horrific world the author has created. It's a book that reminds me a lot of Stephen King's earlier works, and the comparison has been made in almost every review I've read of the book.

But largely I find the book works almost in spite of itself. It's huge, and a little disjointed. We get backstories on a lot of the characters. Even characters that have only minimal pov's, and POV's of characters that are minor elements and more backstories that add very, very little to the plot, but because the central storyline is so tense and because we care so much about the two central characters in the first section and a few more in the second section (it's hard to describe this book without giving away spoilers, so apologies for the vague sentences) I'm drawn through.

As a genre writer, I'm careful to ensure that backstory is crucial to both plot and character and that POV is for important characters, but when you have a storyline as compulsively readable as the Passage and a little girl in danger, and it's as tense as this book, I'll read past the flaws and just enjoy, perhaps skipping a few paragraphs here and there.

And I guess we come back to a rule my critique group decided upon, which is, when a scene/chapter is engaging and tense and readable, there are no rules.