Cronin’s sprawling trilogy comes to end

Justin Cronin to teach course at Rice in spring 2017

In his new book, “The City of Mirrors,” Rice writer-in-residence Justin Cronin wraps up his trilogy about a postapocalyptic world overrun by vampires — a saga that covers 1,000 years and almost 2,000 pages. The earlier novels, “The Passage” and “The Twelve,” were critically acclaimed best-sellers, and his latest debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times’ best-seller list.

As he moves into his post-“Passage” life, Cronin will return to Rice in the spring to teach a writing course. He had become a professor of English emeritus in 2012. “After 25 years in the front of the classroom, it was good to take a break, but I did miss it,” Cronin said. “Teaching requires me to articulate ideas about writing that writers forget at their peril, myself included. In other words, teaching makes me a better writer. And Rice students are a pleasure to be around.”

Almost a decade ago, when Cronin turned from writing literary novels to terrifying apocalyptic sagas, the publishing world took notice. His 2010 book, “The Passage,” about a fearsome battle between humans and a race of vampires, spent three months on the New York Times best-seller lists and made a number of “best books of the year” lists.

The Rice professor didn’t set out to write a blockbuster. He just wanted to make good on a promise to his daughter, who had asked him to “write a book about a girl who saves the world.” A native of New England, Cronin also credits Houston, which makes significant appearances in the trilogy, for the book’s development.

“I’ve lived with my family in Houston for 13 years,” Cronin said. “It’s home to us — the city where our friends live, where our children grew up, where we’ve found meaningful work and a sense of community.”

Cronin followed up his story of Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, mankind’s best hope for humanity, with “The Twelve,” published in 2012. Now he’s completed the trilogy with “The City of Mirrors,” published in May by Ballantine, in which the battle between humans and their vampiric enemies (many of them former humans infected by a virus) goes down to the wire. “The Twelve” and “The City of Mirrors” take place mostly in Freeport, Houston and Kerrville, where Amy’s friends set up a new Republic of Texas, the antithesis of The Homeland, a grim slave-labor state in Iowa, where survivors were exploited and sacrificed by creepy “redeye” virals on behalf of their overlords, the Twelve.

“Justin Cronin’s ‘Passage’ trilogy is remarkable for the unremitting drive of its narrative, for the breathtaking sweep of its imagined future and for the clear lucidity of its language,” horror writer Stephen King said in a review of the book. “’The City of Mirrors’ is a thrilling finale to a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”

Justin Cronin. Photo by Julie Soefer

A force for creative writing at Rice

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin began teaching fiction writing at Rice in fall 2003. He was a major force behind the development of Rice’s creative writing curriculum. Working with then-Dean of Humanities Gary Wihl and Susan Wood, the Gladys Louise Fox Professor Emerita of English, Cronin helped the school establish several new writing-related positions.

In 2005, Cronin helped his students establish the literary magazine R2: The Rice Review as a way to help young writers learn the process of getting published and getting their work out into the world.

Cronin said he is still mulling over the contents of his spring course. “The department happily welcomes Justin back,” said English Department Chair Rosemary Hennessy, the L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities. “No question, his courses will be a great addition to Rice’s growing reputation for creative writing.”

He is currently promoting “The City of Mirrors” in about 21 cities in the U.S., Canada and U.K., but then he’ll come back to his home in Bellaire, climb the stairs to his office and get to work on another book, he has said in media interviews.