Something is coming....Something is here...

Something is coming…..
Something is here…..
Justin Cronin at Waterstones Piccadilly reading from The Passage



A long and very hot day in London working, and the whole day carrying a book in my rucksack – a very special book and a very heavy book.
Thinking back, I have not been as excited about a book/author event since Stephen King at the Royal Festival Hall for Bag of Bones or, long before that, Clive Barker.

The Passage is a event book, it’s a huge novel with such scope and great characters that it cannot fail to draw you in. If it has one failing, and I’m guessing it’s not really a failing, it is that it is over too soon – you will devour it and then want more.

The amazing job that Orion Books did on its pre-launch promotion through advertising, the trailer for the book, the strapline ‘Something is coming’ and that striking image of Amy’s face for the book jacket and the teaser magazine certainly fuelled the fires into making it ‘the’ book of summer 2010.

I could not wait until the UK edition launch and ended up paying top dollar to get a US first edition to read, just in time for my reviewers copy to arrive of the UK edition. And it is THAT good. For once you can believe the hype.

And so, back to that hot night in London, and to the arrival of Justin Cronin at Waterstones Piccadilly to a good crowd of people.
I was expecting the place to be standing room only, but hadn’t realised that many stores already had stocks of signed editions on their shelves and that the author had also visited several others stores on his UK visit.
Nevertheless, the mentions on twitter by Orion’s own staff that they were queuing round their own offices to have their copies signed, just adds to explain just how important a release this has been for so many readers.

As I’ve already said, the book is epic, and it deals with an apocalyptic theme – so I was slightly on edge when Mr Cronin entered the room wearing sandals and asking for the lectern to be set up for him to read from – suddenly I wondered if by reading this book we’d all somehow bought into some new religion and he was about to preach to gospel according to The Passage. Had I missed something?

But fears quickly dissolved as he told of the writing of the book, the initial (well-documented) discussions with his daughter on their runs/bike rides which sparked the idea, and the three months of those discussions which made him realise that he had a story to tell at the end of it.

If you get the chance to see him talk about the book – do. He’s very close to the way that Stephen King describes his own work and I must confess that whilst he was reading a section I closed my eyes and just listened and compared his style to the way King would read his own work, and it was very very close in its tone, pace and style – nothing wrong with any of that, of course.

It was interesting to hear that he decide to leave Philadelphia as the last refuge in the novel as that was where he was from originally, so he put that in as a gift to those who live there.

He now lives in Houston Texas and, after reading a section from the book (one of the diary documents) about evacuation, he told of his own experience of having to pack up his own family to evacuate from the path of Hurricane Rita. Fortunately the gridlocked state they ended up in on the highway by 3am became a turnaround when the storm changed direction, but so soon after Hurricane Katrina nobody was taking any chances. What he experienced in that exodus clearly had an impact and was used to great effect within the evacuation scenes of the novel.

When asked about research he has different levels of doing it.
Firstly there is just the every-day studying the world around him and the way people behave and interact.
He cited the internet as a wonderful tool to find things out quickly and added that ‘if you want to know how to hot-wire a diesel locomotive train - I’m your guy!’
The Passage is a book about a journey, and he made the journey by car to ensure the locations and timings are correct. He did confess that he’d changed a few names as there are so many places called Yukka , and he did take the liberty of relocating one huge prison facility – other than that, everything is real geography.
The main area he felt he needed help with researching was that of firearms.
He arranged to go to the George Bush Park Firing Range and try out everything they had there.
For the second book (The Twelve – due in two years) of the trilogy, he also needed to know more about long distance high calibre rifle shooting. He said that he knew his dentist had a large plot of land and liked to shoot, so he asked him and, as soon as his dental clean was finished, the dentist locked up for the day so they could go and shoot things.

He was asked how his daughter felt about the book now. She was eight when she mentioned that his books were a bit ‘boring’ and that he should write a book about a little girl who saves the world. She’s now thirteen and has read it twice – a sign that a teenager probably likes something.
She has her own horse now, called Teddy, and that’s more than made up for her contribution.
That and the fact that Good Morning America showed a still of her with her father, so if she steps out of line he tells her to remember who was responsible for getting her face on national television.

He knew fairly soon when he started out that it was going to be a big epic long book and his reaction to realising that was ‘woohoo!’ He had something that would require that length of book, something that rarely happens for a writer.

Discussion then turned to which cover he preferred (US or UK) – Mr Cronin’s diplomatic response was to say that he loves everybody.
As the holder of the only US copy in the room, I had to hold my book aloft for all to see so comment could be made.
Most preferred the UK version, and I would be in total agreement with that.

When the question was asked about how he goes about writing and his structure to working on a novel I was somewhat surprised to find that he works to the fairly standard (for most writers) target of 1000 words a day.
He added that it’s not the getting started it’s the finishing that gets a book written.

All in all a great evening and I was so pleased to be there to hear Justin Cronin talk about and read from this fantastic first novel in the trilogy.

To hear him read from it made me think several things.
Firstly that I really needed to read it again now, probably at a slower pace, and now I had more of a handle on the rhythm of the book, the voice of the man who wrote it.
I also felt, with regards to my own writing, a mixture of two things; I am never going to be that good, and yet, oh my God I want to be that good.

And so, to my bookshelf returns a great book, now signed by the author.
As an extra surprise to the family when I got home, I also had Mr Cronin sign a copy of a photograph I took of my own ‘Littles’, which won a contest on his facebook page.



Now to read The Passage again and wait for two long years…..



Keith B Walters