The novel “Carrion Comfort” by Dan Simmons was published for the first time in 1989. It won the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Poll Award as the best horror novel, the World Fantasy Award and the August Derleth Award.

There are some people who feed on the emotions of others and are also able to mentally control normal people, even at a distance. Saul Laski, a psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp, has been looking for almost forty years for one of those people, a former SS officer named Wilhelm von Borchert who uses the false name Willi Borden.

For decades, von Borchert / Borden has been “playing” with people along with two of his friends, Melanie Fuller and Nina Drayton, who have that Ability as well. The relationship between the three, however, come to a crisis with several attempts to kill each other and many innocent people are killed in the crossfire. Thus Saul Laski finds the traces of his old enemy and looks for him with Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry, who investigates some bizarre murders, and Natalie Preston, whose father is one of the innocent victims. Their research is made even more dangerous by the interest of others “mind vampires”.

Initially, Dan Simmons wrote a novelette in 1983. In 1985 he developed the basic concept of the mind vampires a much more sophisticated to write the novel “Carrion Comfort”. Simmons was beginning to have success as a writer and decided to do it full time but the publication of this novel was really complex.

Dan Simmons had found a publisher for “Carrion Comfort” but it went bankrupt and the rights to the novel were taken over by another publisher. The author found himself having to deal with a young editor who started asking for more and more radical changes, up to suggesting that he’d throw it all away and completely rewrite the novel.

In the end, Dan Simmons decided to buy back the rights to “Carrion Comfort” even though at the time the financial sacrifice for him was remarkable. Eventually, the author found another publisher who published it as it was and the novel won various awards that show how it can belong to the horror and fantasy genres.

“Carrion Comfort” may very well also be included in the science fiction genre because there’s at least in part an attempt to give a rational explanation for psychic powers. It can also be considered a thriller and a spy story. From the beginning of his career, Simmons could very well handle himself among multiple genres taking elements from each that were useful for him bleding them without being influenced by their theoretical boundaries.

“Carrion Comfort” is very long because the story is really articulated with various subplots that follow several characters. Dan Simmons often uses detailed descriptions that give a better idea of ​​what’s going on and give depth to the characters. On several occasions, he tells the same events twice from the point of view of two different characters. These features are in some ways a strength and in others a weakness of the novel.

Perhaps the demands of radical changes Dan Simmons had received concerned the wrong elements, such as deleting the part about the Holocaust, but the base concept made sense. In my opinion in several cases there are detailed descriptions that are repetitive but with the only result to stretch the story unnecessarily slowing down the pace of the narrative. The whole part of the novel set in Philadelphia adds little to the story so Simmons could’ve cut it out making just some changes to delete the characters introduced in it.

The good thing is that the characters, even several secondary ones that come and go, often die, in the course of the novel, have their own defined personality, their motivations and sometimes their agendas. There’s an interesting choice by Dan Simmons to tell most of the novel in the third person except the parts that tell the point of view of Melanie Fuller, which are told in the first person. The reader is thus able to enter the mind of a mind vampire and understand her complete amorality and her racism.

Morality and the use of violence with various social and political ramifications are underlying themes that are developed throughout the novel. Of course, the fact that the story is based on the existence of mind vampires responsible for a lot of acts of violence in human history makes it impossible to develop these themes with total realism.

Dan Simmons refers to many historical events of the 20th century but gives them an interpretation different from the “official” one. That’s because in “Carrion Comfort” mind vampires exist and they can manipulate ordinary people influencing important events, all for their nourishment and enjoyment.

The relationship between the various mind vampires is like a big chess game in which everyone tries to prove to be the strongest in manipulating people. Their powers lead them to be totally self-centered and devoid of any empathy for others.

The presence of so many of these despicable characters and their brutal actions make “Carrion Comfort” a tough story, not only because it concerns in part the Holocaust. Compared to them, the members of a youth gang of Philadelphia turn out to be good guys.

“Carrion Comfort” is too long but I think it’s never boring, on the contrary I found most of the story compelling. Since the story is a mix of genres, however, it’s difficult to recommend it to a specific type of reader: let’s just say that you must be used to very long and detailed novels and you have to like at least the majority of the elements it contains.