“I was happy before The Passage sold – I was writing books, doing what I wanted, a supportive publisher, I had two healthy children. But it gave him the luxury of quitting his other job – teaching English at universities in Texas and Philadelphia – and brought him a lot more readers. He says that he still writes in the room above his garage and complains he is the only one who takes the bins out. Not much changed for Cronin in the decade after The Passage barnstormed bookshops. A sequel, The Twelve, arrived in 2012 and now, four years later, the final book is here: The City of Mirrors. Some of the snippier reviews deemed it an imitation of Stephen King’s The Stand King himself called The Passage “enthralling”, with “the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve”. His horror-fantasy blend debuted on the New York Times bestsellers list in third spot and stayed for eight weeks. 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.Ĭronin’s doorstopper arrived in 2010, amid much excitement: before it was even printed, rights were sold in 45 countries and Hollywood began bidding on the film rights (these went to Fox 2000, for Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free). Initially set in 2016, the US government starts whisking away death row inmates to test a drug intended to lengthen human life. What that decade produced was a trilogy beginning with The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire blockbuster. “Two days later, I had 30 single-space pages of complete narrative information,” he says. 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. The pair slung ideas back and forth on their bikes, until the weather turned. 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).

F or three months in 2006, every day after school, Justin Cronin took his daughter for a bike ride.

The ferryman book justin cronin