As with previous volumes, City of Mirrors freely dances about in time, indeed Cronin does something which by rights should be death to any suspense and seemingly shows you where two characters will wind up in the very second chapter, quite aside from his thousand year after virus retrospectives which readers of his first two volumes will be familiar with. There is no question that the book right from its beginning is clearly building to a climax, an increasing tension that takes a good 25 hours to come to fruition, and yet nowhere, despite the fact we barely see a viral for most of the book did I feel I'd lost the plot at all simply because of how everything fitted together, indeed I was on tenterhooks waiting for the hammer to fall, and actually glad that certain characters could enjoy some peace before it did.
Usually this is a distinct no no, but in Cronin it's just one more element he weaves into his dark, richly painted canvas of words, as able to freely talk of love and hate and fear as he is of mountains or trees, the horror of virals or the steady march of time.Īnother point is pacing. Stylistically for example, Cronin often freely expresses emotions, telling us what his characters feel. One thing which struck me forcibly about the book whose entire 35 or so hours I got through in less than four days, is just how many rules of good writing Cronin is able to break, and yet how little this matters. I absolutely devoured The Passage, loving every minute, picked up The Twelve as soon as it was available, and the only reason I didn't do the same with City of Mirrors is that I was rather busy getting married. "A fun zombocalypse" was what I thought I was going to get, however if you're reading this review and have probably already read the first two volumes in the trilogy, you'll know that describing Justin Cronin as "a fun zombocalypse" is rather like describing A Christmas Carol as "a bit of a ghost story". One day in 2011 I was looking around for something to read and decided I ought to make an inroad on the huge pile of books I'd picked up at random on a whim from authors I'd not tried before.
Justin Cronin was an author I ran into by accident.
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