Dubbed “an unlikely heir to America’s genre-fiction throne” by The New York Times, Justin Cronin is the bestselling author of the “relentless [and] addictive” (Wall Street Journal) new novel The Ferryman as well as the blockbuster trilogy The Passage. Through each volume—The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors—Cronin has produced “an undeniable and compelling epic… a complex narrative of flight and forgiveness, of great suffering and staggering loss, of terrible betrayals and incredible hope” (The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin won a PEN/Hemingway Award for his debut Mary and O’Neil: A Novel In Stories. Both Mary and O’Neil and his 2004 novel, The Summer Guest, exemplify the kind of delicate yet deliberate writing and memorable character portraits that readers have come to expect from award-winning literary fiction. With 2010’s blockbuster The Passage, however, Cronin turned to darker, more gripping fare.

Debuting at #3 on The New York Times bestseller list, The Passage has since sold over a million copies. It features many of the hallmarks of a genre fiction blockbuster: a brooding, postapocalyptic setting; what Publishers Weekly calls “a sweeping epic style”; and supernatural antagonists with exceptional strength and a thirst for blood. But The Passage is not your typical vampire novel. The Passage and its sequels comprise a trilogy that Stephen King has called “enthralling”—not merely for its hypnotic intensity, but for the raw beauty of its prose, bridging the divide between literary and genre fiction without diminishing either.

“[The Passage is] a bona fide thriller that is sharply written, deeply humane, ablaze with big ideas, and absolutely impossible to put down.”

—Jennifer Egan

Spanning nearly a century, The Passage combines elements of horror, science fiction, and fantasy in a way that ultimately transcends genre conventions. In contrast to Cronin’s first two novels, which are graceful and restrained, “The Passage and The Twelve vibrate with a different kind of energy: louder, wilder, more unkempt” (The New York Times). The San Francisco Chronicle selected The Passage as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2010, while The National Post called it “Homeric” and “one of the creepiest books” of the year. When Stephen King saw Cronin on Good Morning America, King called to congratulate him: “You put the scare back in vampires, buddy!” Adapted for TV by Fox, The Passage was praised by USA Today as the “sci-fi epic broadcast TV deserves.”

The City of Mirrors delivers a gripping conclusion “with all of the heartbreak, joy, and unexpected twists of fate that events in The Passage and The Twelve foreordained” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). The final installment was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller that “brings the series to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion, but also exhibits Cronin’s moving exploration of love as both a destructive force and an elemental need, elevating this work among its dystopian peers” (Library Journal, starred review).

Readers get the chance to enter a new world of Cronin’s imagination with his latest New York Times bestseller, The Ferryman, a suspenseful sci-fi thriller with a shocking twist and nods to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Garnering four separate starred pre-publication reviews and another ringing endorsement from horror master Stephen King—”[e]xciting, mysterious, and totally satisfying, this is a book to get lost in”—the novel follows the titular ferryman and a group of survivors on a hidden island utopia who enjoy a life of luxury until they reach a certain age and are ferried away to be mysteriously reborn. Both deeply emotional and ambitious in scope, Chris Bohjalian calls it a “brilliant hybrid of a novel, as tense as it is tender, as surprising as it is smart.”

A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Among other honors, Cronin is the recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award (for his novel Mary and O’Neil), the Stephen Crane Prize, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

For more information on Justin Cronin, please visit him on Facebook, Twitter and at enterthepassage.com.