Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons is a lengthy horror novel that delves into the chilling tale of a small group of individuals with the ability to control the minds of others. The story follows multiple plot lines that weave in and out of each other, keeping the reader engrossed with clever concepts and plenty of creepy moments. Simmons' writing style is described as detailed, epic, disturbing, and intense, with the ability to create a deep and intense read that takes more than one sitting to fully appreciate.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings for Carrion Comfort include graphic violence, sexual assault, racism, and genocide, particularly in reference to the Holocaust.
From The Publisher:
"CARRION COMFORT is one of the three greatest horror novels of the 20th century. Simple as that." -Stephen King
"Epic in scale and scope but intimately disturbing, CARRION COMFORT spans the ages to rewrite history and tug at the very fabric of reality. A nightmarish chronicle of predator and prey that will shatter your world view forever. A true classic." -Guillermo del Toro
"CARRION COMFORT is one of the scariest books ever written. Whenever I get the question asked Who's your favorite author? my answer is always Dan Simmons." -James Rollins
"One of the few major reinventions of the vampire concept, on a par with Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and Stephen King's Salem's Lot. -David Morrell
THE PAST... Caught behind the lines of Hitler's Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face to face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazi's themselves…
THE PRESENT... Compelled by the encounter to survive at all costs, so begins a journey that for Saul will span decades and cross continents, plunging into the darkest corners of 20th century history to reveal a secret society of beings who may often exist behind the world's most horrible and violent events. Killing from a distance, and by darkly manipulative proxy, they are people with the psychic ability to 'use' humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, feed off their emotions, force them to acts of unspeakable aggression. Each year, three of the most powerful of this hidden order meet to discuss their ongoing campaign of induced bloodshed and deliberate destruction. But this reunion, something will go terribly wrong. Saul's quest is about to reach its elusive object, drawing hunter and hunted alike into a struggle that will plumb the depths of mankind's attraction to violence, and determine the future of the world itself…
Ratings (27)
Incredible (8) | |
Loved It (8) | |
Liked It (6) | |
It Was OK (3) | |
Did Not Like (2) |
Reader Stats (82):
Read It (25) | |
Currently Reading (1) | |
Want To Read (40) | |
Did Not Finish (3) | |
Not Interested (13) |
2 comment(s)
[T:]his entire century has been a miserable melodrama written by third-rate minds at the expense of other people's souls and lives. We can't stop it. Even if we put an end to these...these aberrations, it will only shift the spotlight to some other carrion-eating actor in this violent farce. These things are done every day by people with no shred of this absurd psychic ability...people exercising power in the form of violence by right of their place, position, by bullet or ballot or the point of their knife blade...
These are the words of Saul Laski, one of the main characters in Simmons
Carrion Comfort. Laski is a Holocaust survivor, an Israeli settler and war veteran, a psychiatrist, and one of the few people in the world to survive an encounter with the mind vampires referred to as "aberrations" in the above quote.
Carrion Comfort is a vampire novel only in the loosest sense of the term. After over 700 pages of text, I'm still not sure exactly what these vampires eat; it isn't blood or flesh or anything physical. They have a psychic Ability to control other people, either for brief amounts of time or through mental conditioning over longer periods. It isn't clear whether they "eat" energy from people they kill after using, or people they kill through their surrogates. However, the lack of definitive answers about the vampires is not what weakens the novel. Ultimately,
Carrion Comfort suffers because it overreaches.
The book is at its best when the narrative follows Saul Laski. Forty years after the Holocaust, Saul has survivor's guilt stemming from the moment his father and brother walked into a gas chamber without him. His memories of the mass graves he helped dig and fill; his two escapes from Nazi hands; his work as a medic with a Polish resistance group; and his mental refrain to survive no matter what, are haunting and powerful passages. To defeat the vampire Nazi* he meets in the camps, Saul must literally arm himself with the last memories of Jews who were not so lucky. The history of Jews in the 20th century, including the founding of Israel and that country's place in international politics, is the foundation and background of this book.
A gore packed horror novel reflecting on the plight of Polish Jews would probably be enough to work with, but Simmons goes farther by including American racism (in the 19th and 20th centuries; in the South and the North!), sexism, bad film-making and general Hollywood debauchery of the 1980s, sexual assault (to which the "mindrape" of the vampires is often compared (with disappointing results)), Israeli-Palestinian relations, the theory of violence in modern life, and gang warfare, with toss-off references to pretty much anything important that has happened since WWII. This is, predictably, a bit too ambitious, and though Simmons has some fabulous action scenes and plenty of scary monsters, the book ultimately doesn't live up to the emotional promise of the prologue.
If you can get past the first chapter, in which many boring villains do and say incredibly boring things (this is almost where I gave it a DNF),
Carrion Comfort is a fun read, especially for die-hard horror fans looking for a comprehensive overview of the genre.
*Vampire. Nazi. It sounds so 2009 that I almost can't believe it was written in 1989.
Too disturbing!
What can you read after
Carrion Comfort?
About the Author:
Dan Simmons is the award-winning author of several novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Terror and Drood. He lives in Colorado.
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