Bloodthirsty on the block

Wherever you go this summer you will probably see or hear about someone reading THE PASSAGE, the first volume in an apocalyptic scifi trilogy by the suddenly-hot Justin Cronin. (That is, in hype, not in -- well, you make your judgment call there.) Here's your cheat sheet:

• In THE PASSAGE, a top-secret military experiment called Project NOAH trying to foster eternal life instead creates a virus that turns people into vampires. A little girl is the only one who can save them, aided by a Harvard professor. (Cronin went to Harvard, by the way.)
• If we had all been paying attention in the summer of 2007, we might have followed Cronin's $3.75M deal for the trilogy... indicating that it would either be big or fail grandly. This was just two years after the first volume of that other vampire series hit the bestseller lists, and the same summer the third in that series came out.
• After being on the 'literary' track for several years with the novels MARY AND O'NEIL and THE SUMMER GUEST, he sent THE PASSAGE out under a pseudonym, guessing that publishers would pigeonhole him without looking at his work. (Can't say he's wrong.)
• (This bullet is blank because one of my coworkers just sent me Sad Keanu and I got distracted)
• Time: "Even when as a kid, I was reading these big, fat summer books — fat as a Rueben sandwich."
• NY Times review: "This already-exhaustive book is studded with diary entries, academic papers and other ostensible evidence that its fictitious stories of destruction are true. Every now and then, as when the Gulf of Mexico is described as an oil slick, these accounts are even scarier than intended."