In a secret project, the military has employed the research of a Harvard microbiologist in hopes of engineering a race of superbeings who can master any skill in minutes and whose wounds heal almost instantaneously. It opens in 2018, as America is engaged in nonstop warfare, terrorists are attacking us at home, and a gallon of gas costs $13. While it relies at times on convention, “The Passage” is astutely plotted and imaginative enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader. If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it.Īnd in many respects, he has delivered the promised blockbuster. Ballantine Books bought the lot for over $3 million, and the film rights to the novel sold before the book was completed. His new one, “The Passage,” is a 766-page doorstop, a dystopian epic that’s the first installment in a projected vampire trilogy.
The genre has proved so indomitable that it’s a wonder the Balkan underclass, whose age-old folk tales began it all, hasn’t started to request royalties.Ĭronin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his first two books, “Mary and O’Neil” and “The Summer Guest,” were literary explorations of life’s quotidian challenges. As Justin Cronin clearly knows, if you’re a writer seeking to slough off highbrow pretensions - to reject your early efforts at “quiet” fiction and write something with commercial appeal, something that will, if not conquer the critics, at least pay for your kid’s college education - you’d be wise to opt for a vampire novel.
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