Next week, I’ll be posting a review of Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a nearly 800-page novel, the first in a planned trilogy, about vampires created by a military experiment gone awry and a girl who may be charged with saving the world. It is, admittedly, not the kind of thing I normally read. It’s also not the kind of thing Cronin has normally written. Today, the New York Times writes about the book and Cronin’s influences:

“I have not read Twilight,” Mr. Cronin, 47, said of the Stephenie Meyer book that kick-started the recent public obsession with the paranormal, adding that he was reared on vampire comics, the 1960s television soap opera Dark Shadows and the 1931 film version of Dracula, with Bela Lugosi. “My relationship to vampire material definitely predates the recent renaissance.”

In this video clip, Cronin discusses the project, and seems giddy at the departure from his previous, quieter novels, laughing through parts of this description of The Passage: “Obviously, it has some aspects of a horror novel; it is a dystopia novel; it is a post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction; it’s a thriller; it has an FBI agent in it; it has an orphaned girl who can talk to animals; it has not one, but two runaway trains.”