With The City of Mirrors, The Passage’s author has reached the end of his bestselling vampire trilogy, which grew out of chats with his daughter. Now she has left home and he’s not sure what comes next
For three months in 2006, every day after school, Justin Cronin took his daughter for a bike ride. As they cycled around their neighbourhood, eight-year-old Iris prodded him for a story, which had to obey two rules: firstly, “that it was interesting” and secondly, that one character had red hair (to match her own). The pair slung ideas back and forth on their bikes, until the weather turned. Bikes went in the shed and Cronin, who at that stage was the author of a few moderately successful books, started noting their brainstorming marathon down. “Two days later, I had 30 single-space pages of complete narrative information,” he says. “I’m a writer! I couldn’t ignore that. So I started actually writing it. Then 10 years went by.”
What that decade produced was a trilogy beginning with The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire blockbuster. Initially set in 2016, the US government starts whisking away death row inmates to test a drug intended to lengthen human life. Progress is stagnating until FBI agents are asked to snatch a six-year-old girl called Amy so she can receive a refined dose of the drug – and everything goes to hell.
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