Justin Cronin Talks Vampires, THE CITY OF MIRRORS and More!

In 2010, Justin Cronin's The Passage was a phenomenon. The unforgettable tale that critics and readers compared to the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Margaret Atwood became a runaway bestseller and enchanted readers around the globe.

In a recent interview with Seattle Times, Cronin spoke with them at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co.

Answering a question as to why he chose vampires as his monsters, Cronin says, "We have four versions of humanity that are monsters simultaneously. The vampire, the werewolf, the Frankenstein, the zombies. The vampire for me is the most interesting ... The shapeshifting, the mirrors, the garlic and the native soil, the fact that they can't cross water.... Jonas Lear (the biochemist in the trilogy who unleashes the virus by searching for the key to immortality) has come to believe that the myth of the vampire ... is so widespread that there is some truth to it. Too bad, this actually works, as 30 million blood-drinking, flesh-eating monsters are unleashed on humanity."

Read the full interview here.

It spent 3 months on The New York Times bestseller list. It was featured on more than a dozen "Best of the Year" lists, including Time's "Top 10 Fiction of 2010," NPR's "Year's Most Transporting Books," and Esquire's "Best & Brightest of 2010." It was a #1 Indie Next Selection. It sold in over 40 countries and became a bestseller in many of them. Stephen King called The Passage "enthralling... read this book and the ordinary world disappears."

Now, PEN/Hemingway Award-winner Justin Cronin bring us the conclusion to his epic trilogy with The City of Mirrors. For the last time, Amy-the Girl from Nowhere, who lived a thousand years-will join her friends and face down the demons that threaten the last of humanity.

Justin Cronin is also the author of Mary and O'Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest. Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writer's Award.

A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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