Carrion Comfort

January 1, 1989
The second novel by World Fantasy Award-winner Simmons ( The Song of Kali ) is a 636-page epic that draws on a variety of genres--horror, science fiction, political thriller, Hollywood roman a clef. It centers around a small number of ``mind vampires'' who can subjugate other people to their wills, read their minds, experience through their senses. The immensely powerful vampires use others, often bloodily, and often in frivolous ``games'' (hunting human prey, chess games with human pieces, and so on). Opposing them are Saul Laski, a psychologist and concentration-camp survivor, who is devoted to tracking down the Nazi vampire von Borchert; Natalie Preston, whose father inadvertently and fatally crossed the path of a pawn of the ancient, dotty vampire Melanie Fuller; Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry, dragged in while investigating the multiple murders that marked the departure of Melanie Fuller from Charleston; and a host of other normals and vampires whose lives impinge on those of the principals. While he could profitably have trimmed the novel by a third, Simmons has produced, overall, a compelling thriller.

November 15, 2009
Does evil exist? You betcha—and you will obey it.

Horrormeister Simmons (Drood, 2009, etc.) has been dishing up dollops of gruesome spectacle for decades now, and he's hit on a winning formula: Give vampires and other children of the night lots to do over lots of pages, set up a Big Idea as backdrop to the proceedings and season with lashings of sex, violence and current events. Here, as usual, the foreplay to sex is most often in the form of mind control, the sex itself a matter of quantification and qualification ("her breasts were full, perhaps too full for her height, and they pressed nicely against her gold and blue blazer"), and the cuddling afterward a prelude to nasty surprises. The Big Idea involves—well, World War II, and the hidden forces that control history, and man's being a wolf to other men, and mind control, and other good things, with key moments set against the backdrop of Charleston, S.C., which is of course a splendidly creepy place, almost as creepy as Anne Rice's New Orleans. (The novel is also reminiscent at turns of Stephen King, X-Men and Gone with the Wind.) The tale unfolds in the early years of the Reagan administration, and Simmons is note-perfect on period details ("no one obeyed the 55 m.p.h. speed limit") while never losing sight of the task at hand, which is to set spectacular villains in motion and watch them visit mayhem on the planet while the good guys figure out what comes next. Can good prevail? Given a trio of very naughty baddies, that's a question that remains in play until the very end. The many, many chapters leading up to it are full of slaughter, philosophical discussion, bureaucratic bumbling and spy-versus-spy stuff (Gordon Liddy with fangs and Mossad meets Mephistopheles with German accents)—all of it improbable in the extreme, but in very good fun.

A satisfying story that delivers everything it promises.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 12, 2009
One sometimes wonders if Simmons is capable of writing succinctly. With The Terror, his long-winded style matched the mood and setting admirably. Carrion Comfort, though, is all action. Set in the 1980s, it pits three unlikely heroes against a secret cabal of humans with an ability to control the minds of others. Its fast pace catapults the reader through the book's first third, but this speed can't be sustained. The story bogs down, ultimately, in a mess of intrigue among the mind-vampires and preparations for the heroes' final showdown. The ending is both an anticlimax and a relief. Verdict Libraries should purchase, as demand will arise from Simmons's fans, but this should have been a 500-page novel at most.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.