Justin Cronin

Author and 2004 NEA Literature Fellow
Headshot of a man.

Music Credit:

Excerpts of “Some Are More Equal” from the album, Oil, composed and performed by Hans Teuber and Paul Rucker. Music is available for download at paulrucker.com 

 Justin Cronin: Here’s the difference, I think, between this book — these books, The Passage Trilogy — and my previous books, is simply that I set my characters running for their lives. I knew that that was the big difference. My first couple of novels, people face questions in their life, but they’re not really under mortal pressure. And what I did in The Passage is that my characters — they’re running for their lives at every second. It’s a very, very dangerous world that they live in. And the question I asked of each of those characters is, if you’re running for your life, what’s the one thing you’ll carry?

Jo Reed: That is the novelist Justin Cronin, and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Justin Cronin was what’s known as a literary novelist. He had a MFA from Iowa, he was the recipient of a 2004 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a PEN/Hemingway Award for his novel Mary and O’Neil. Critics appreciated his work and his career was moving along, if not spectacularly, very nicely. And then came The Passage — a walloping 700 plus page post-apocalyptic novel. It is vividly written, spans a hundred or so years, and is peopled with dozens of compelling characters. It’s a page-turner, and it turns out there were many pages to turn. The Passage was the first of a three book series. The Twelve followed a year later, and this May, volume three, The City of Mirrors, was released, and The Passage trilogy was complete. It was a bold and enormously successful undertaking for Justin Cronin and immensely satisfying for his readers, including me. And as it happens, I picked up The Passage at exactly the right moment. I needed to get out of myself, and The Passage was my ride.

Jo Reed: I am so happy to be talking to you because I have to give you the most heartfelt thanks. And this might be way too much information, but I don’t care.

Justin Cronin: Okay. I’m a writer. I like too much information. I write 2,000 pages, you know, so I guess—

Jo Reed: <laughs> When The Passage first came out, it was sent to me, and I am not the post-apocalyptic, vampiric kind of reader. I’ve never read any of the vampire books.

Justin Cronin: Well, that makes two of us. <laughs>

Jo Reed: It is not my genre at all. And it was Christmastime, and everybody was away in my house, and I was supposed to go and spend Christmas with my brother in Upstate New York, and I came down with a horrible cold. I couldn’t talk. And so, I couldn’t go. And I was fine with that. That was okay. And for whatever reason, I decided to look through my mail, which I do very infrequently. <laughs> You know, once a month.

Justin Cronin: Yeah, yeah.

Jo Reed: And I had had a mammogram, and I had gotten this letter, and it was Christmas Eve, and it said, “We want you to come back in.” And it was just like, “Oh, my God. What do I do with this information?” I can’t do anything. Nobody is here. I’m sick. And I went to my bookshelves, looking for a book that would take me someplace else, and I picked up yours. And I swear, I just fell into that book and was so grateful.

Justin Cronin: That’s terrific. I’m pleased to be of use. <laughs> I’m pleased to be of use.

Jo Reed: No, seriously, I was so grateful, because I was transported. So thank you.

Justin Cronin: You’re very welcome. You know, I’m sorry that happened to you, but I do like stories like that, where the book does perform some really useful function in a person’s life.

Jo Reed: Yeah, and it’s interesting that this style of writing isn’t your style, any more than it’s my style of reading, and yet, somehow, here we both are.

Justin Cronin: Yeah, I mean, I went about writing this book knowing that it was a very different kind of project for me, but I ended up — I ended up writing it the same way I write everything else. I mean, you write how you write, and your concerns as a person and, I suppose, as an artist, they don’t really change. And actually, I had no idea if The Passage Trilogy would be purchased by any publisher at all. I mean, it was kind out of the box for me, and I just did it to see what would happen next.

Jo Reed: When you started The Passage, did you know this was going to be a trilogy? When did that sort of sink in?

Justin Cronin: Yeah. No, I knew that pretty early on. You know, the story of the books’ origins have become kind of sort of attached to the books. I mean, a lot of people know it, but I undertook the project —I was actually writing another book. It wasn’t going particularly well, and my daughter kind of dared me to do something, as she says, “interesting.” “Why don’t you write an interesting book?” <laughs>

Jo Reed: Don’t you love kids?

Justin Cronin: Yeah. <laughs> She was worried that my other books might be boring, which — you know, they were not — she was eight years old. So I took that with a grain of salt. They might be boring to an eight-year-old. She hadn’t read them, either, which — in my own defense. But we spent three months together for an hour each day after school. She would ride her bike, and I was running, and I was jogging, and we would go around the streets of our Houston neighborhood, and we put together a story. And her specific directions to it were it had to be about a girl who saves the world, and it had to be interesting, and it had to have a character with red hair — because she’s a redhead. And we did this just for fun. I had no intention of writing a book, but we came up with basically the plot of the first book, at the end of which the world has not been completely saved. So I knew that I was going to be writing three. It’s sort of a classic beginning, middle, end structure, and I knew everything about the first book, insofar as you can know everything before you actually start writing it, and I had a good sense of the second and the third going forward. So I knew it was going to be a trilogy very early on.

Jo Reed: How did vampires, or virals, which I really prefer as a term — how did virals capture your interest, or your daughter’s interest?

Justin Cronin: Well, my daughter wanted me to write a story about a girl who saves the world, and she needed to save it from something. <laughs> So I went back to the list of the boogeymen out there. And we really have four monsters in our culture, and by monsters, I mean things that are essentially of human form — they’re distortions of the human form. We have zombies, we have werewolves, we have Frankensteins, and we have the vampire, as the four figures. That covers pretty much everything, right? I mean, Godzilla, for instance, is not a monster because it’s not a human being, in a sense. It represents something else, metaphorically. And the vampire as a figure is the most interesting, in a sense that it’s soft clay. It’s got all these details. You can do a lot with it. You can stick other things onto it. And I chose it for that reason. It really wasn’t a case where I said, “Let’s go — I’m going to go write a vampire novel.” In fact, this was in 2005 when I started assembling this story, which was before that kind of vampire boom lit went on. You know those books that I’m referring to, which I have not read. I’m not part of the demographic. You know, I had my own vampires as a kid. Do you remember the TV show Dark Shadows?

Jo Reed: Oh, right! Barnabas!

Justin Cronin: Right. Sure! Yeah, yeah. I was — you know, it was a vampire soap opera in the 1970s, and sure, I watched that after school, and it was really scary. If you go back and look at episodes on it on YouTube now, it’s pretty laughable. The production values are so bad, but everybody’s got a narrative like this. Everybody’s got their own vampire story. So I decided to use that, in a sense, for its utility. And I’d noticed that it was, as I say, very sticky. You could put other things onto it. And so when I was writing The Passage, I felt more like I was writing a road novel and an apocalyptic novel, not a monster novel or a horror novel.

Jo Reed: You had a really good origin story for your virals.

Justin Cronin: Right. It’s essentially a disease. A guy named Jonas Lear, a scientist, for reasons that are actually intensely personal, believes that — as I think many people do — that behind every myth, there’s probably some kind of human reality. And he’s of the belief that the vampire legend, being so ubiquitous and so robust and so detailed, probably has a basis in nature — perhaps a disease agent that creates symptoms that are roughly analogous to the magical symptoms of vampire lore. And so he goes out to look for it, and of course it’s a catastrophe, right? I mean, the military gets involved. The next thing you know, they’ve created a race of super-predators that eat the North American continent.

Jo Reed: <laughs> What a great way of putting it.

Justin Cronin: Yeah. Good work, guys. Yeah. <laughs>

Jo Reed: In this third book, The City of Mirrors, you very unexpectedly give us a pre-origin story, if you will. We get the story of a scientist, Timothy Fanning, who had a brief cameo in the first book and the hovers over the whole story.

Justin Cronin: Yes, it was the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expected it. <laughs> Yeah. I mean, when I got to tell his story, it’s the aboriginal catastrophe of the tale. It’s the thing that predates history — that is actually where the whole thing started. And I decided to let him tell it in first person, because he’d been sitting in Grand Central Station for a hundred years, reading books and ruminating, and I realized that he would be, for that reason, a very charismatic narrator. I mean, he’s a learned guy to begin with, but he was my opportunity to just sort of let the rhetoric explode into something that was kind of rich and interesting. And I loved writing the character. I loved — I loved his voice, which, to be honest, I mean, there’s, over time, — when you write in the first person — there’s a bit of a mind-meld that happened. I mean, I gave to him a lot of experiences that I had in my own life. And over time, our voices merged a little bit. I mean, people ask me, “What character are you the most like?” And I’d say, “Apart from the whole destroying the world thing, I think I’d probably have the most in common with Fanning.”

Jo Reed: Well, putting the whole destruction of the world to one side, The Passage Trilogy really closely examines the centrality of the ties that bind us — like the lovers, certainly, but parents and children and friends.

Justin Cronin: Yeah. I mean, The Passage is a love story. It’s just a — it deals with love in its various capacities. One of the ideas behind the story, of course, is that if you’re going to — the people who are going to survive in a world like this, the ones who are going to survive, and ultimately even triumph, which they do — those are going to be the people who feel connected to other people. They’re not going to try to go it alone, in a sense. They’re going to be people who have love in their lives, which gives their lives meaning, and therefore a reason to survive and to struggle and to face very difficult odds. And the question I asked of each of those characters is, if you’re running for your life, what’s the one thing you’ll carry? And the answer for each of those characters is that they will carry somebody else, and that’s why they’re survivors.

Jo Reed: You also create this world beyond a world —

Justin Cronin: Well that’s a phrase.

Jo Reed: — where characters interact with one another, and in the midst of all the violence it’s like this place out of time.

Justin Cronin: As I wrote the book, I always knew the questions of, for instance, divine attention would naturally arise from a story in which the world ended, thanks to a project called Project Noah. I mean, sort of the book wears some of its iconography overtly on its sleeve. But the trilogy also makes the case that, you know, the reality is not exactly what we can see. There’s other things present. And in that sense, it’s, I suppose, a reflection of where I am in life and what I hope is true. But in these novels, for instance, there is an afterlife. It makes a strong case for that.

Jo Reed: Very much so.

Justin Cronin: I mean — and you get to go there, and you get to see it. And maybe I’m just reaching an age where I want to send everybody to heaven in the end, but it seemed really part of the story that these characters would not be merely confined to the trials of life. That there was a sort of subterranean ethical and moral framework behind everything. Things were not an accident. There was a sense of fate present, that history is not merely just a series of mistakes and chances governed by the cold hand of physical law, for instance. That there is a deeper shape to events and to people’s lives, and that imparts meaning to those lives. And I’m very interested in the idea of meaning. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to have a child? What does it — in any world, whether it’s our world or a world in which death can swoop down out of the trees at any second and grab you. So, that’s sort of the concern of, I suppose, my phase of life, but it was central to the project from the beginning. I didn’t want to write a book that was just an entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertaining. I mean, I think that’s one of the great things that books can do. I mean, for instance, you were in a tough spot, and I distracted you. <laughs> I entertained you. But there were other things on my mind, as well — deeper questions.

Jo Reed: The book, I mean, just has this remarkable span — it’s moving back and forth over a thousand years of history, which really lets us witness how history remakes itself over time.

Justin Cronin: Well, in some ways, the operating thesis of the whole project, was that — you know, as Faulkner said, “The past isn’t gone; it isn’t even past.” I mean, I was constantly making a case for the fact that events in one timeframe bring pressure onto events in a future timeframe, the idea being that — I mean, really, The Passage Trilogy is about the formation of a religion in a future society, a thousand years in the future. The events that you see in these novels, which are very human events, have become the basis for a sort of whole cultural identity, in the way that religion tends to function. And so it was natural to the project to be working in those multiple timeframes. And it was also, for me, as a writer — somebody who gets up in the morning, pours himself a strong cup of coffee, and toddles off to his office over the garage — it was an opportunity for me always to be doing something new and interesting. I didn’t have to just drive forward for 2,000 pages with the same story. I was operating with multiple stories, and that was part of the pleasure and excitement of the project.

Jo Reed: Well for you, practically speaking, that’s a lot to keep up with.

Justin Cronin: Right.

Jo Reed: You have the big time span, you have alternative worlds, you have the multiplicity of characters.

Justin Cronin: Right. I had to grow a few hat sizes, really, is the answer. You know, I had to keep track of a lot of stuff. But I liked —

Jo Reed: Did you have a map?

Justin Cronin: No. No, I mean I’d just try to hold the whole thing in my head, pretty much. You know, I did research, as I went, on lots of subjects, and there was a certain amount of notetaking associated with that. But for the most part, I just tried to know these characters in this world as well as they knew themselves. I felt like that would be the best way to write the book, and it was a thing I had to learn how to do. When I sat down to write The Passage, I was known as a certain kind of writer, and I decided not to stay that kind of writer. So managing a large cast of characters and multiple timeframes, multiple storylines, getting them all to connect to each other — that was a learning experience for me, and it was hard to do, sometimes. But at other times, I felt like, oh, I’d discovered what it was I, in a sense, was naturally good at.

Jo Reed: It’s so interesting to me that the book you wrote before The Passage, Mary and O’Neil, is a novel of short stories and now—

Justin Cronin: Right.

Jo Reed: — and now here you are with the three volume novel.

Justin Cronin: Oh, I went from the very small to the huge. I mean, that was-- yeah. And, well, here’s what happened. I was trained in the short story. When I was writing as a student in a classroom, that was what I was doing, because the way creative writing is taught in the United States, in the university system, is that it privileges the short story, because it seems like a good place to kind of cut your teeth, right? I mean, the risks of writing a bad story are much smaller, in terms of time and personal energy, than writing a bad novel, right? You write a bad short story, yeah, you lost a few weeks. You write a bad novel, your kids are crying, your wife is divorcing you. <laughs> I mean, you just spent a year wasting your time.

Jo Reed: If you’re lucky.

Justin Cronin: Yeah, if you’re lucky. And so I started writing short stories, like most writers do, and had no idea how to write a novel. And in fact, nobody told me. And there are skills rather specific to writing a novel that we all, I think, intrinsically know by reading novels, but which had never been openly declared. And writing a novel sounded to me like, you know, like a moonshot. I had no idea how to do it. So I undertook my first book, trying to build a novel out of short stories, and we ended up calling it A Novel in Stories, and indeed that book really does have a kind of three-act structure, some of the things that novels naturally possess, but it is built out of short stories. And what you’re seeing in that book is somebody kind of trying to teach himself how to write a novel. I already knew how to do a short story. But, by the way, I’ll say writing a good short story is much harder than writing a good novel because there’s no room for error.

Jo Reed: It’s like a poem: Every word has to count.

Justin Cronin: And every word has to be related to every other word. I mean, that’s the problem. I mean, it’s very, very dense. And I haven’t written one in years. They’re too hard for me. <laughs> My natural inclination is to go the other direction, and it always has been. When I decided to kind of let loose and just uncork with The Passage — it was like I’d found my natural environment. Finally, I’d found it, and it was a place where there were not limits on length, and not limits on the cast of characters, and space was not a consideration, and there was room for error, which was nice. Every novel contains a certain number of tangents, and I could sort of indulge that. I mean, one of the things that’s obviously true about me, if you read the books, is I’ve never met a secondary character that I didn’t want to marry, you know. Everybody’s got kind of a backstory. I know a lot about them. I mean, a lot of it ends up getting put on the cutting-room floor, but in the meantime —

Jo Reed: Well, it’s very Dickensian. I mean, his secondary characters — my God, sometimes they feel more real than my next-door neighbor.

Justin Cronin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love that tradition, where you’re really creating a whole world. And people ask me about the world-building aspect of The Passage, and what they’re asking about is sort of the material constraints because it is a postindustrial society, and it has certain resources, lacks other resources. There’s-- you know, there’s no modern medicine. Putting gas in your car is not easy. I mean, there’s lots of material questions for doing that. But the real world-building that I did was building a world full of people, because I really wanted to populate this story so you had a sense of the community and how it felt now and operated, and that there was more than just my main cast of characters in it, but they were surrounded by others.

Jo Reed: But Justin, publishing really likes its genres.

Justin Coleman: You’re right, that’s true.

Jo Reed: How did you navigate that move from “literary writer” — and I’m using inverted commas, which you can’t see — to a more “popular writer” — again with the inverted commas?

Justin Cronin: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no. I mean, whether or not it’s openly stated or not, publishing kind of wants you to find an audience and then drive down the same trench for the rest of your life, which I honestly can’t imagine doing. I knew that people would come to the work with certain kinds of preconceptions. I mean, when you send a book out, the first thing they do is they call up — they look on BookScan to see how many copies of your previous books got sold, right? That’s one thing they do. And then they’d make lots of decisions about what they’re about to read, if they are in any way acquainted with your earlier work. I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted this to be a completely blind read. So what I said to my agent — and she agreed — so I said, “Let’s send it out under a pseudonym. I don’t intend to publish it under a pseudonym, but let’s send it out under a pseudonym. People can know that this is a writer with whom you are acquainted. Perhaps you know his work, and he’s won some prizes, and his name’s not going to be a total mystery to you. But in the meantime, just read what you got. Read these pages.” And I chose a name — a pseudonym — that was deliberately ambiguous on gender, by which I mean it wasn’t overtly hiding the gender, but the reader could decide for themselves, based on their own sort of intuitions — how they feel about the world, who they are — what gender it was. I chose the name Jordan Ainsley. That’s who the book-- the manuscript went under the name Jordan Ainsley. And, in a sense, it was kind of an experiment, because when we — when you pick up a book and decide to read it, you go into it with lots of preconceptions. I decided I wanted to deliberately subvert that process, because I was at a point in my career where I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get pigeonholed. And indeed, it was a very successful strategy. The people that were interested in the manuscript were told that if they wanted to know who I was, that’s fine, but, you know, get into the auction, baby. <laughs> So it was a bit of an incentive.

Jo Reed: When did you decide writing was what you wanted to do?

Justin Cronin: That’s an interesting question. I always say I became a writer because I just kept forgetting to go to law school. I was always a good writer. I wrote good sentences. I was a talky sort of wiseacre, and those are the kids that — they always say, “Oh, go to law school.” I mean, that’s kind of the natural prescription for somebody like that. And in a way, I always assumed that I would do that. But I was an English major in college, and took a couple of creative writing classes. I got my worst grade in English in creative writing in college. I got a C-plus. And I guess that really kind of rankled me, because then I devoted my whole life to undoing it. <laughs> But I was a high-school teacher after college for a couple years, and that did not suit me at all, and I decided I would go back to writing school, in some manner. And so I applied to two different kinds of programs, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I applied to journalism programs, and I applied to some creative writing programs. And as it turns out, all the journalism programs required me to pay tuition, which I had no money. And the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I ultimately went — as well as a couple other creative writing programs — offered me fellowships. So I went there, because I could afford it. And then always had just enough success to keep going, to not get too distracted. You know, I’d publish another short story. I published a couple of novellas. That got me my first teaching job, teaching creative writing at a college in Philadelphia, La Salle, where, because I was professionally bound to — on a daily basis — articulate ideas about writing that might be useful to young people, I had to start thinking very much about it in a way that was useful to myself. And so I combined those two professions, and each one kind of informing the other, and eventually wrote my first book, and then that book was critically respected. It didn’t sell a lot of copies. It wasn’t supposed to. But that enabled me to do the second book.

Jo Reed: You got a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Justin Cronin: I did. I did. It enabled me to finish my second book, and I learned more. And then I got this idea, courtesy of my nine-year-old, and now I’m a full-time writer. So it didn’t happen in — there wasn’t a moment.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you — you’ve spent 10 years on these books with these characters — at the end, are you at the point now that you miss them?

Justin Cronin: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Yeah, you do.

Justin Cronin: Sure. Well, first of all, they’re not real people, right? <laughs> They occupy the imagination of the reader as temporary real people. But they are an interesting fusion of a sort of autonomous state, and then extensions of my will, right? And I’ve tried to figure out what that actually is and what it means, and try to metaphorize it in some way that helps me understand it, and what I’ve come up with is that building a novel, building a character, is kind of like raising a child, in the sense that you have a certain amount of control for a while, right? But your job, ultimately, is to lead them-- to take them to a place where they will leave you. And that’s — for this trilogy, that’s the end of the trilogy, where I stood on the pier and watched them all sail away. And what happens to me, whenever I finish something — and this is true of each of the individual books, as well, because I always have a sort of low period between them — is that you realize the extent to which you have been borrowing or constructing your emotional life from the emotions of the book. Because in order to — in order for me to write it as well as I can, I really have to be emotionally sort of taking the same ride as my characters. And in that sense, my emotional life is constructed out of an imaginary world for years at a time. And then, when you finish, it’s-- you know, it’s like dumping every drawer, right? All of a sudden, there’s this kind of big hollow space where those emotions used to reside, and for a certain period of time, I’m pretty mopey and pretty melancholy. It’s a — people think that when you finish a book, it’s like finishing your final exams, and you jet off to Cabo and do Jell-O shots. And it’s not at all like that. It’s actually quite sobering.

Jo Reed: I find endings to be so difficult in literature — in theater, too, but in literature, particularly — that I actually forgive any book that falls to pieces after four-fifths.

Justin Cronin: An awful lot of them do. Let’s be honest.

Jo Reed: Yeah, and they do, and I do not hold it against any author, because endings are hard. You have such good endings.

Justin Cronin: Well, thank you.

Jo Reed: So I just have to give you a big shout-out for that.

Justin Cronin: Thank you. I think the reason that you like them is because I know them before I start.

Jo Reed: Ah.

Justin Cronin: I don’t try to find the ending while I’m writing. I know the ending before I start the book. So it’s always aimed at a terminal point. I knew the last sentence of the third book of The Passage Trilogy since 2007.

Jo Reed: Ooh. Yeah. Okay, that could be. So you knew exactly where you were steering this ship.

Justin Cronin: Exactly. Yeah, there are writers who are planners, and there are writers who are kind of more organic in their process. I could never be the organic kind, right, who says — you know, the ones who say, “I write into this novel and kind of find it, and the characters tell me where to go.” That’s just not possible for me, temperamentally. I mean, I would throw myself off a building if I had to let the novel sort of grow as I was writing it. I write a very detailed plan. It’s my operating thesis that writing a book is like launching a missile. I mean, you really got to aim it very carefully. And since I always knew where I was going, I was able to get up every morning and know what my job was for the day, and that enabled me to face it in a reasonably sane and cheerful manner, and then stop for the day, and then go back the next day and do it again.

Jo Reed: And I have one final, horrible question, and that is, I know you’re going out flogging the book right now, but do you have anything that you’re thinking about writing next?

Justin Cronin: Oh, sure. Two things: one, it’s my job, and two, if I didn’t, I’d go crazy. The only real solution to the emotional, zombified, empty period <laughs> after the end of a book is to find another book to write. And I was working on one project for 10 years, so there was a convenient and happy backlog of stuff that I had come across or thought about over the last 10 years that, now that The Passage Trilogy is done, I could go back to that list and say, “Okay, what’s here?” And strangely enough, I looked at all those ideas, and they’re really good, but I have something else on my mind. Because time passes, and so what seemed interesting to you in 2012 might not be what’s interesting to you now. And 10 years is a long time. It’s enough time, for instance, for my children to grow up. The little girl who helped me come up with the basic story is now going to be a sophomore at Brown next year. And my son, who was just a little thing, and he was learning to walk, practically, is now 13 years old. So enough has changed in my life that some of those ideas seem to come from a different Justin, but very quickly, that enabled me to think about what’s on my mind now, at my phase of life, and sort of connect to a new idea. So even though I’m on book tour, I spend a certain amount of time every day in some reasonably contemplative state, planning what comes next.

Jo Reed: And I, for one, will look forward to reading it. Justin, thank you for giving me your time. And thank you for these books. I just so appreciate them.

Justin Cronin: Well, thank you. It’s a lovely compliment.

Jo Reed: That is Justin Cronin. He just published the final book of The Passage trilogy — The City of Mirrors. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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Justin Cronin brings his post-apocalyptic Passage trilogy to a close with The City of Mirrors.