Sci-fi superstar
Justin Cronin’s sophisticated vampire tales surpassed Twilight and True Blood, and ranked in Time’s top 10 in 2010. He tells Karen Tay what happens next.
In 2010, at the height of the vamp-chic lust, when pale, brooding creatures of the night with names like Edward Cullen and Bill Compton and Eric Northman roamed the literary landscape, Justin Cronin’s The Passage sneaked quietly into bestseller lists.
Like an errant child, Cronin’s vision of vampires (or virals) stormed into popular lore and demanded attention, not so much carving a niche as ripping the stillbeating heart out of sexy humanlooking vampires and replacing them with something more resembling the mutant love child of zombies and nightwalkers.
It was a gamble that worked. The Passage spent three months on the New York Times’ bestseller list, was included in Time magazine’s top 10 books of 2010, sold in more than 40 countries and was lauded by Stephen King. Suddenly, the sparkly vampires of Twilight and True Blood seemed quaint, even a bit ridiculous. They were human bad boys and girls with sharp teeth, a thirst for blood and an allergy to the sun. Cronin’s virals were the real thing – lost souls, reverted to their primitive animal self and with only one purpose in mind – to obliterate any living thing with a pulse on Earth.
In person, Cronin is an unassuming man. He has a comfortable, quiet kind of authority probably bestowed by years of doing media interviews and his time spent as a professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas, incidentally also the setting for large swathes of the novels in his bestselling postapocalyptic trilogy: The Passage.
‘‘Everything influences you as a writer and you should not pretend otherwise,’’ says Cronin as we sit in an Auckland hotel in the swampy artificial heat that can only come from central heating set to ‘‘boil’’.
His brows remain remarkably cool for the remainder of the interview, which tells you something about the man. This is a man not easily fazed, a good thing when you’ve spent the past decade living in an imaginary doomsday society filled with largely manmade disaster, calamity and tragedy.
‘‘From the B-movies you watched as a kid on Saturday night on black-and-white TV, to all the Shakespeare I read in college … there are a million little Easter eggs. It’s a basket of literary references to different genres. There’s so many of them at this point that I can’t even remember all the little Easter eggs I put out in the grass.’’
He is not much of a believer in dichotomies, big battles between good and evil and clear distinctions between saints and sinners are for blockbuster Hollywood movies. ‘‘Go watch Star Wars,’’ he says. ‘‘The Sith and the Jedi, that’s fine, but it’s not how life is.
‘‘Good and evil is a meaningless dichotomy because there is no such thing. People are a pile of contradictions. They have grievances and injuries. Everybody’s got a lot of scar tissue and I would define a personality … I mean, what is a personality? You’re a collection of contradictions. I always try to put some dirt on the hero and some sunshine on the villain. The thing to remember about villains is that they were born innocent souls just like you and me. They were cute little babies in a basket.’’
A ‘‘sweeping saga’’ is one term that can be used to describe the trilogy. Cronin has been compared to every great writer under the sun, from Stephen King to Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy. Yet though comparisons can be drawn between the format of his novels and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that is where any similarity or stylistic influence ends.
What sets Cronin’s trilogy apart is possibly that novels are both timeless and timely. Like Schrodinger’s cat, the novels could only have been written by someone living in these times, but the broader themes of love, family and tribal or communal loyalty could have been written at any time, anywhere from the dawn of civilisation.
‘‘The trilogy is meant to offer a story that is the human story behind the foundation of a religion – that’s the point of the whole thing,’’ says Cronin, which is a little like saying the Bible is the story of what happens to Adam and Eve after they leave the Garden of Eden. After all, it’s in the detail that stories happen. Cronin acknowledges this, musing that the books are really about ‘‘the things of daily life’’, albeit in ‘‘a post-apocalyptic future where death can grab you from the trees’’.
‘‘You’re gonna have a job, you’re gonna have children, you’re gonna do all the things human beings do because they’re human beings, even though the world around you has changed and altered the meaning of these things.’’
And again – the Schrodinger’s paradox, a story that is about the minutiae of daily life, but also in a way isn’t. The characters’ preoccupation with the humdrum of existence belies the fact that the plot also largely mirrors current events of the past 10 years, asking those big, important philosophical questions about where humanity could be heading.
‘‘The book [The Passage] was very much born out of a specific feeling of disgust and despair in 2005, which seems a long time ago now. There are a lot of new things to be disgusted and despaired by now, but 2005 was the height of the Iraq War. What had happened in Abu Ghraib had come out, and Hurricane Katrina had just drowned New Orleans and the world had just learned a quick lesson in the incompetence of government in the face of largescale disaster. The book was born under a group of anxieties where the US had committed to going into a permanent state of war after 9/11.’’
Cronin thinks of The City of Mirrors, the third and concluding book in The Passage trilogy, as vastly different in feel to the other two because of the passing of time.
‘‘The guy who wrote The Passage is not me. That was 10 years ago. I don’t know if people have noticed this, but the third book is almost an empty nester novel. That’s the kind of phase of life I’m in now. I’m the same age as the President of the United States. He’s out of a job now too. What happens when you finish a book, or in this case three books, is that you get fired. I got fired by my own books. It’s an odd and interesting time when you’re between things.’’
There are rumours that The Passage will be made into a movie – the books were optioned by Ridley Scott’s production company years ago. But Cronin would prefer to see it as a TV series.
‘‘They’re [the books] are somewhat cumbersome for film. There’s a lot of characters. Good novels make good television, but they make terrible movies, it doesn’t fit. A really good short story is about the right length for a movie.’’
For now, Cronin is content to ‘‘blow on the embers’’ of a new novel idea, ‘‘trying to get them to catch on fire’’.
‘‘I’m a bit of a Cassandra [the prophet of Greek myth]. My wife says I’m the family Cassandra. I’m the one who can see disaster around the corner. On the whole, I’m probably somewhat pessimistic but in some ways, the gesture of having children (Cronin has two) implies a certain kind of optimism – because there’s a future they will live in that you will not be around to see, so you’re crossing your fingers that it will be a good one.’’
Sounds like the formula for another New York Times bestseller right there.
'I always try to put some dirt on the hero and some sunshine on the villain. The thing to remember about villains is that they were born innocent souls just like you and me. They were cute little babies in a basket.' Justin Cronin