We erred on the side of caution.Įverything in the end, though, comes back to the principles of story. During an hour-long conversation, Cronin and I worry about how much we can divulge without ruining the magic trick. In fact, this is the kind of book that turns an interview into a razor-wire tiptoe between spoilers. It’s impossible to expound further without giving away some of The Ferryman’s most WTF revelations, of which there are many. The gleaming, anodyne Prospera is a universe and a few genres away from the apocalyptic grunge of The Passage, but Cronin’s fascination with time, truth, and the telling of tales has not dimmed. Following a troubling encounter with his own father, Proctor is propelled on a journey of discovery with existentially explosive stakes. Of course, anyone with even the most cursory understanding of genre fiction understands immediately that nothing is as it seems. The elderly, infirm, and unhappy take a boat trip to the Nursery, where memories are wiped, bodies are renewed, and life begins afresh. Proctor Bennett, in his role as Ferryman, is tasked with escorting Prosperans to their “reiteration.” You see, in this urban idyll, no one truly dies. Welcome to Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy EmpireĪccording to the author, his latest release, The Ferryman, is “a thriller, a detective novel, a conspiracy novel, and speculative fiction in the tradition of golden-age sci-fi.” The book welcomes us to Prospera, an island state curtained off from the rest of a devastated world.Victor LaValle Is Reimagining the Western.
What eventually did appears at first to be a very different novel from what came before. It concluded a remarkable feat, a trilogy Stephen King called “one of the great achievements of American fantasy fiction.” Nearly a million words in length, spanning centuries of human struggle, with a huge cast of characters, it understandably left the author “pretty spent.” Rather than dive directly into another book, he opted to wait, “to see what would rise organically” in his imagination. You could say it’s about how religions are born.Ĭronin completed the trilogy in 2016 with The City of Mirrors. His mega-selling trilogy, The Passage, may be a mixture of vampire horror, apocalyptic science fiction, adventure novel, and western, but at its thematic heart, it’s a story about how stories come to be more than story. More than honest, in fact: his novels actively try to unpick that secret, and to answer questions about the origins, impact, and longevity of human storytelling. When asked, he talks about the “deep stew of the unconscious mind” and credits a creative writing teacher who told him his job as writer is “to be sitting at his keyboard when the story comes from above.” Cronin offers anecdotes and recognizes inspirations, but he’s honest about the true mystery that underpins his work. Justin Cronin has no ideas where his stories come from.
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