The Passage (Justin Cronin)

A hundred years after the vampire epidemic destroyed America, a small group of survivors hangs on in a community protected by UV floodlights ... but their batteries are slowly failing, and the community is rotting from within. This kicks off an epic quest for survival that unfolds across the three books of this trilogy.

There are two things I especially liked about this series. First, the characters are more than just devices for delivering the next chapter of the story. Cronin is interested in the choices people make under existential pressure, and he lets his characters do some very unexpected things. Second, he's just so clearly having fun. Cronin started as a fancy MFA-circuit author, but he took up a challenge from his daughter to write a different kind of novel. This gave him the freedom to put in so many things that he clearly loves, which are (almost always) handled as homage rather than pastiche. While I was sometimes able to predict how a set-piece would turn out, the larger story continued to surprise me.

My only complaint about this series is one short chapter at the end of the third book, where a character gets something they don't deserve. Reading it as what the character thinks is happening, rather than as truth from an omniscient narrator, fixed that problem for me - and it might not even bother you at all.

Overall, it's rare to find a book that's both this heartbreaking and this fun. Highly recommended!