Friday Reads: The City of Mirrors

How are you enjoying your apocalypse? Cataloging & Acquisitions Librarian Adam Pellman found this particular Friday Reads, The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin, a little too on the nose for our current situation. 

The City of Mirrors is the final book in a trilogy about a vampire plague that has overrun North America (and probably the rest of the world, too). In the first book of the trilogy, an American scientist on an expedition in the jungles of Central America was bitten by a particularly nasty species of bat, leading to an infection that transformed him into a bloodthirsty vampire with superhuman strength. Government scientists then decided to use the vampire to start an experiment with human subjects that, unsurprisingly, went awry, resulting in the death or infection of almost everyone on the continent. This third book is set about a century later, as the descendants of those first survivors have gathered in isolated colonies in a fight against any remaining infected humans, which they call "virals."

I like the trilogy, but this turned out to be an unwise choice of novels to read during a pandemic. It's an inadvertently timely read. In one passage, an old newspaper article from the time of the initial outbreak sounds like it could be from 2020: "The Easter Virus ... can travel great distances attached to dust motes or respiratory droplets, causing many health officials to liken it to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Travel bans have done little to slow its spread, as have attempts by officials in many cities to prevent people from congregating in public places." So much for escapism!