Thus, the events of the entire trilogy are revealed to be Fanning’s reply to that ancient loss, his challenge to whatever universal force might have caused his personal tragedy.

In what’s left of the world without Liz, he sees little of value he plans to bring the whole play crashing down. The disease, of course, makes the chemist a viral-but love and its special self-obsession will make Erik Fanning a monster. His psyche is pinned to the floor of that concourse centuries on, nostalgic and nihilistic, he makes the ruined terminal his nest.Īfter learning of Liz’s death, Fanning joins Lear to search in her honor for a virus with miraculous healing properties. The tragedy strands Fanning waiting for hours, ignorant, at Grand Central. Years later, she and Fanning plan to run away together, but she dies of a longstanding illness before they can meet. Bartley’s Burger Cottage-“which I have now used in two different novels!” Cronin emphasizes-and fell deeply for Lear’s girlfriend and future wife, Liz. He met a young man named Jonas Lear on the stools at Mr. Like so many alumni, Erik Fanning is haunted by the entanglements he entered into at Harvard. Only now can they appreciate the extent to which the invisible root of the Passage Trilogy led back to a campus love triangle.

Only now do they learn how Fanning liked his college experience, or which final club he was in. For years and hundreds of pages already, readers have known that biochemist Erik Fanning caught a rare virus on an expedition to Bolivia, becoming in the process the first and master viral. He gives them Cambridge, viewed with keen sentiment through the eyes of his villain: Harvard College class of 1993.

In that spirit, in a surprising section of The City of Mirrors, Cronin gives readers a novella-length refuge from the grim future of the two previous books. You could forgive Cronin for losing patience with the dialogue. Of course, this was always a reductive narrative, old hat even back in 2010. The notion of a tension between the two Cronins, a literary past and a genre future, became the master theme of his success, one revisited in profile after profile. The novels, monstrously successful, track a shifting cast of survivors in a plot that telescopes across centuries. Thin patches of humanity hang desperately onto the blasted landscape. Since the 2010 publication of The Passage, Cronin has been spinning readers an apocalyptic vision: quick and hungry creatures called virals-not vampires, exactly, but vampiric-have scoured most of the life from the Western Hemisphere. But it was his pivot to the supernatural that won Cronin a multi-million-dollar book deal and a commanding spot atop the bestseller lists.

Justin cronin the city of mirrors