They’re becoming empty-nesters, which is not entirely unlike my own phase of life. In the first book, my principle gang of warrior-pioneers are people in their early 20s. In the second book, they’ve aged enough to make children and have families. The three books are in many ways about phases of life-as it is for Amy, who goes from childhood to adulthood to old age.īy the time you get to the third section of The City of Mirrors, my characters are in their 50s, and they’re running things. Justin Cronin: The major change in The City of Mirrors for me, was that my characters catch up to my age.

We spoke with him about writing the final book of the trilogy, humanizing a monstrous villain, and what he’s writing next.Īdam Morgan: How is The City of Mirrors different from the previous two novels in the series? Then, in a jungle in Bolivia, I died.”) who’s been hiding out in New York, and his final confrontation with the Girl from Nowhere, Amy Bellafonte, and the most bad-ass heroine in recent memory: Alicia Donadio.Ĭronin is in Chicago this week for Book Expo America (BEA) 2016, and will be signing books and speaking on a panel called “ Unwritten: Stories You Haven’t Read (Yet)” at BookCon on Saturday. And now, the third and final novel, The City of Mirrors, will finally reveal the source of the vampire virus, the man known as Zero (“In life I was a scientist called Fanning. The second book in the trilogy, The Twelve, deepened the series’s mythology and moved the action to Texas and Iowa. Easily the best thing to come out of our 21st-century obsession with vampires, Justin Cronin’s 2010 breakout novel The Passagetook a high-concept premise-a biological vampire virus that reduces human civilization to a single (as far as we know), well-armed outpost in California-and grounded it in literary prose and a vivid sense of place.

The twelve trilogy