First Lines: The City of Mirrors

Before diving into the last part of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy, I reread the first two novels. First time round, I thought they were pulpy fun, a good read, but not, you know, particularly great or anything. But upon revisiting them, I can’t recall why I thought that. Perfectly good fun, and pretty great as well.

I’m not gonna recap The Passage and The Twelve. Imagine a world where an military experiment goes horribly wrong, and that a vampire infestation wipes out almost all of humanity in North America. Of course, there are some survivors, who upon the arrival of Amy, a byproduct of the same experiment, set out to see what’s there to salvage. Sort of.

The City of Mirrors starts twenty-something years after the events of The Twelve. After the defeat of all but one of the Ur-Vampires, some sort of normalcy has returned, and life went on. Now, it seems that the end play, is at hand: the one remaining vampire, he who is called Zero, who is the Source, will go and try to finalize the vampire domination of the world. Meanwhile, some others have a dream of an island sanctuary …

Its seems to me that The City of Mirrors is the perfect conclusion to the trilogy. It hits all the spots. There’s a chapter where you get the back story of Zero, and dammit, it just about redeems the fucker. And the ending? Well, it’s probably the only right one. So I have no complaints. And yet, the same uneasy feeling I had with the first two parts gnaws at me. So maybe I’ll just need to revisit it in a while to see what’s up.

Book read
Justin Cronin — The City of Mirrors
First line
The ground yielded easily under her blade, unlocking a black smell of earth.