Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Vampire industrial complex and Justin Cronin

Many parents will, at some time, have played the game with their children of making up a story together. Usually, this exercise in dreaming up a plot and characters is a ploy to improve youngsters’ reading and writing skills, or just to encourage them to complete their homework. But for American academic, Justin Cronin, it has turned him into the most talked-about writer of the summer.
He was talking plot lines with his eight-year-old daughter, Iris, while he pounded the streets of their native Houston, Texas, in his running shoes and she cycled alongside him on her bicycle, little knowing that the pair had come up with the template for his novel The Passage, for which he would receive an advance of £2.5 million. This chilling and compelling post-apocalyptic tale of science gone wrong, killer vampires and the beleaguered remnants of humanity struggling to survive is now a bestseller in the US, with the film option sold to Ridley Scott for a reported £1.2 million. It is now out here to catch the poolside reading market.

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