In summer the need for genre reading grips me, stacks of fat squat books howling my name like newsprint-scented wolves. I love serious fiction. There are Great Books gathering dust unread on my shelf. But ultimately the call of the genre will get me, wrap me up in a quick-drawn world and plot-drive me where it will. The inevitability makes me wonder how bad a fate that is.

You know your Aunt Minnie’s hot V.C. Andrews habit isn’t the same as your ex-roommate’s long-term partnership with big ol’ Russian date bait masterpieces, but most of the time, we only talk about “readers” vs. “nonreaders.” Book lovers come in different flavors, and every time I write about the writing/reading relationship I trip over a giant flavor-definition aside. Enough of that. Here are the five types of readers that I meet in real life. I’m coming back to these at length soon, so if you have a complaint you’d better …

So there’s a brand-new copy of The Passage getting warm—very warm—in the backseat of my car. And the chatter about literary writer Justin Cronin taking on a vampire novel is heating up to approximately the same temperature. Is he a sellout?
Cronin has been teaching writing and producing fine, intimate novelistic portraits of American life for twenty-five years. Sometime around 2006, he began work on The Passage, the first of a “triptych” of postapocalyptic novels that span a thousand-year period of the end of civilization as we know it. With …