Salon's first-ever reading club pick was Justin Cronin's The Passage, and now they have an interview with him.

Could you talk a bit about "The Passage's" intertextuality? How would you describe your novel's relationship to the texts it references through the epigraphs and the allusive character names?

I think it's disingenuous for any writer to pretend they're inventing the wheel, and that their book isn't a comment on and grappling with other books--especially when they're writing within an established storytelling tradition, such as vampire narrative. I decided to throw my arms around this basic truth of writing and openly invoke other novels, stories, plays and poems. Some of these references are subtle, little Easter eggs tucked in the grass, and some are overt, such as the works referenced in the epigraphs (especially "King Lear," "The Tempest" and "Twelfth Night"). The list of referenced works is actually so long I don't have space here to name them all, and no doubt there are more I'm not even aware of. They're absolutely part of the novel and my sense of it, but the reader doesn't need to be consciously aware of their presence to experience the story.

Comments

[healy]

the story is extremely evocative, ach scene into which Cronin brings the reader, though different, is engaging and made feel like an invisible observer with these characters.