Cronin before Zombie book Passages, Recommending Mary & O'Neil

it isn't often I find an author I've missed who can write with the intensity and insight of Justin Cronin about real people. Like Wallace Stegner.  In Mary & O'Neil, Cronin gets it so right about the mother/wife who's just discovered a breast tumor, about the husband who contemplates adultery but can't let himself, and the post-college son who's unsuccessfully searching for a career in his liberal arts education, and the brother who nurses his sister through her final illness. I cried, I laughed, I read it again right away, back to back. I wanted those people for my friends.

And then when I rushed to Amazon to find the books he must have written between the first novel and today, 9 years later, I find out he's the author I ranted about months ago who received the huge advance for a trilogy about a virus that turns Americans into zombies. ARRGGH. I'm in pain to think he may have wasted his talent on a fad, but because Mary & O'Neil was so perfectly executed, I am going to withhold my opinion until I read Passages. Woe is me, I have to read about zombies.