SPOILER ALERT: The City of Mirrors is the final installment of a trilogy; if you haven’t read the first two books in the series then proceed at your own risk.

“…a beginning and an ending joined”

It is eight months after the liberation of the Homeland: Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, is presumed dead; Alicia has gone missing to parts, and for reasons, unknown; Michael is a recluse in his boat on the Gulf of Mexico; and Peter has gone to Kerrville, Texas, with Caleb. Billions are dead; global civilization is destroyed. No one has spotted an Easter Virus–spawned viral for three years—the war is over.

The few survivors turn to rebuilding and dare to hope, but all is not as it seems. Lucius the mystic lives in a shack alone, outside of Kerrville, seeing his visions, drawing what he sees, and collecting blood—he is preparing. Not long after Michael unexpectedly arrives at Lucius’s shack with a plan to save what’s left of humanity, animals—and then people—begin to go missing. Zero (think “Patient Zero”), the father of The Twelve, lives still and commands his Many, and his hatred will not rest.

The City of Mirrors is the final installment in Justin Cronin’s The Passage Trilogy. Fans have waited for more than three years to discover the fate of these beloved characters, and Cronin does not disappoint. Apocalypse threatens a dystopia sparsely populated by prophets and false prophets, seers and lunatics, sages and fools; and the messiah is called upon once again to save the survivors.

Cronin’s story is biblical, mythical, legend; heavily messianic, full of portents and resurrections, both bodily and societal. The plot is intricate, the vision full. The pace is steady until approximately halfway through and then picks up, tension building as the players take their places for the final showdown. The narrative moves back and forth through time and space, employing parallel realities and multiple points of view, shifting from third person to first and back. It is a challenge and too long, but the conclusion is thrilling.

Much is explained as all of the loose threads are braided. Zero’s motivation for global destruction is a disappointment, but then he is supposed to be a monster of selfishness, the Joker as dystopian vampire with shades of Ann Rice’s Lestat. “Behind every great hatred is a love story,” claims Zero.

Cronin’s imagery is resonant (“stars thick as powder” in the night sky), his similes vivid (“Alicia was like a comet, given to long, unannounced absences and blazing, unanticipated returns”). The virals’ movements were “so fine that they barely parted air.” Cronin’s rendering of a ruined civilization is haunting.

The City of Mirrors is also a warning. From Zero’s story, poetic in despair: “Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitudes,” Cronin writes. “We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.” But The City of Mirrors also tells us that it ain’t over till it’s over.