About a month ago I finished Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons, which was quite an enjoyable read. Since then, I have read two other books, hence the "quick review" part of the title.
I've always loved Dan Simmons as an author, and my favorite of his works are by far the Hyperion saga and The Terror, two very different settings and genres. Carrion Comfort is much closer to the The Terror, genre-wise, in that it is a suspenseful and sometimes horrific novel. All similarity ends there, though, as Carrion Comfort takes place in a contemporary setting, well, 1980's, and centers on a group of people who have a powerful influence on the minds of others, essentially feeding off of turmoil, and those who fight against them. The book coins the term "mind vampires" for the depraved villains of the story.
I found the book to be quite gripping and well-written, but at times I felt my interest waning in certain plot points, with the middle part of the book in particular. The central portion takes place mainly in an area of Philadelphia known as Germantown and I found some of the character interaction to be a little artificial, and felt that this act dragged on for a little too long. The opening and closing acts of the story were hard to put down with a rapidly moving plot forcing characters into situations that were hard to get out of. Saul, a holocaust survivor, has a particularly interesting story in his never-ending quest to find the Oberst, a Nazi who had forced control over him when he was in Chelmno, an extermination camp during WWII.
Overall, Carrion Comfort provided an excellent read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in a well-written horror book, but I would still hand The Terror to someone first.
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