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A Vampire Novel with Literary Chops: Justin Cronin Talks "The Passage" at BookPeople [Reading Preview]
Justin Cronin, author of the post-apocalyptic vampire epic The Passage, will be at BookPeople Saturday, and his breathlessly hyped page-turner is likely to be the book of the summer. A reference to Twilight and current teen-driven vampire craze seems obligatory, but it isn’t all that apt; set in a near-future North America in which Jenna Bush is governor of Texas (a dystopic setup in and of itself, some might say), The Passage stars undead that are vicious, animalistic, mindless—more akin to speedy, glowing, gravity-defying versions of Romero zombies or the viral monsters of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain.
And at 766 pages, with two more books to follow, the scope of The Passage is broad, encompassing a global catastrophe, and garnering more than a few comparisons to Stephen King’s plague classic The Stand. King, in fact, provided a glowing blurb for The Passage’s jacket, calling it a “novel-reader’s novel.” Indeed, this isn’t necessarily a book for genre fans only. Cronin—a Rice University English professor, Harvard grad, and Iowa Writers Workshop alumnus—is the previous author of two well-received literary novels, one of which won a PEN/Hemingway award.
People magazine once said of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, “Norman Mailer writing a mystery is like Julia Child making a hamburger. But there are hamburgers and there are hamburgers, and this is one spectacular hamburger.” That applies here. Cronin’s attention to detail and memorable, realistic characters enhance what could otherwise have turned out to be a parade of tired genre tropes. So far, horror authorship looks pretty good on Cronin, and a $3.75 million book advance and $1.75 million film-rights sale to Ridley Scott don’t hurt. (Plus, “Justin Cronin” just sounds like a horror author’s name, right?)
Saturday’s BookPeople event will see Cronin sitting down with Cyndi Hughes, executive director of the Writers’ League of Texas, about the art of writing, and, presumably, about how the writers in attendance can sell their own novels for millions of dollars to a major publisher or studio.
An interesting side note: key parts of the book are set in Texas, and one of the main characters is a guy who really hates living in Houston (“The end of the world was Houston, Texas,” he says.) Hopefully someone will ask what Cronin himself thinks of his city of residence on Saturday.
