Carrion Comfort
by Dan Simmons
Summary
Some people are born with the Ability: push into a human mind, wear the body like a glove, and walk it into anything, including murder, and the using confers vitality, the users aging backward on other people's violence. Simmons's monsters are these mind vampires, and his masterstroke is where he finds them: not in castles but in a Charleston parlour, where three genteel old friends, Melanie, Nina and Willi, meet to compare scores in the Game they have played for decades, a competitive tally of engineered atrocities the newspapers file as random horror.
The novel opens the ledger in 1942, at the gates of a death camp, where a young Jewish prisoner named Saul Laski is used by a German officer with the Ability and survives to spend a lifetime hunting the thing that rode him. Forty years later the Charleston reunion goes wrong, the Trio turn on each other, and Saul's private war collides with something larger: the Island Club, a cabal of American power brokers with the Ability who play their annual Game with borrowed bodies, and whose summer camp island hosts the book's legendary climax, human beings moved as chess pieces across a floodlit board.
It is enormous and earns it, a thriller wired into the century's real atrocities, with the Ability standing openly for every fascination that makes crowds obey.
Around six hundred pages in most editions.
Best for readers who want horror at epic length with ideas load bearing throughout, the genre's definitive treatment of violence as spectator sport.
Historical Context & Significance
Carrion Comfort won the Bram Stoker Award for 1989, along with the Locus poll for best horror novel, in the middle of the most astonishing two years any genre writer has had: Dan Simmons published Hyperion, which won science fiction's Hugo, in the same season, taking the top awards of two fields more or less simultaneously, and his earlier Song of Kali had already won the World Fantasy Award with his first novel.
The book grew from a novelette in Omni and took its title from Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet of spiritual despair, a characteristic Simmons move, the genre novel wearing serious literature openly.
Its influence sits visibly on the vampire as metaphor tradition, the Ability reading as fascism, celebrity and media power in turn, and King has called it among the greatest horror novels of its era. Simmons went on to The Terror and Drood, historical horror at the same scale; this remains the pure statement of his dark side.