Yes, it is just as beautiful, brutal and obsessively detailed as parts one and two and (bonus) comes out of the gate with an extra-special dose of confidence that you only get when you're a writer coming into the home stretch knowing exactly where you're going and how to get there.īut for the rest of you, let's go through this the long way. Yes, it ties up a lot of the loose ends (but, notably, not all of them). You're going to pick it up no matter what, so the only thing that matters here is to say that, yes, it holds up. If you read The Passage and The Twelve, odds are you've been waiting on this one for some time now. He is a storyteller on an epic George-R-R-Martin-plus-machine-guns-and-vampires scale whose second-best skill must be the construction of spreadsheets just to keep track of who is where, when and why, who they love, who they hate, and what they've got in their pockets.Īuthor Interviews A Novel Reminder That Vampires Are Monsters, Tooīut look. Because Justin Cronin? He is a storyteller. Okay, so he probably told them that last part. That it would utilize the scary, blood-hungry kind of vampires (or 'virals,' to use his terminology) who don't sparkle or write any poetry, and it would be told in the form of letters, newspaper clippings, maps, extracts of future-y commission reports, dreams, telepathic communication, massive flashbacks and just good, old-fashioned boot-in-the-teeth storytelling.

Involve dozens and dozens of interlinked characters who find each other, marry, age, have children, live and die and go crazy and become president. Things like how, by the time it was done, the series would stretch to something like 1,500 pages. So much more than that simple nerd-bait elevator pitch ever revealed. The things that make this trilogy different. And then waited for the publishers to line up and throw money at him.īut then there are the things he probably didn't tell them. It's a post-apocalyptic sci-fi western with vampires is all he would've had to say. When Justin Cronin pitched his Passage trilogy - which began with The Passage in 2010, continued with The Twelve in 2012 and is now finishing with The City Of Mirrors - it must have been one of the easiest buys in the history of publishing. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The City of Mirrors Author Justin Cronin

The passage justin cronin review