Carrion Comfort: Dan Simmons

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I remember sitting in an overheated little delicatessen across the street from the apartment building. Verbally harassed by gang members, she begins sending Vincent to brutally butcher and impale the heads of gang members as a warning, which sparks further violence in the community but also draws the attention of both Saul's group and the Island Club. We adjourned to the dining room, Willi pouring himself another glass of bourbon and Nina fluttering her hands in mock frustration at the interruption of the Game. The Drift, her autobiographical spoken word show, was part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2019 season and Black History Month 2019. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission.

Gentry and Natalie get to the house and almost to Melanie, but Vincent attacks, killing Gentry, as Natalie kills Vincent.This means they will not simply control a few people on the private island to see who is the most powerful, but control leaders of nations with nuclear results. The novel portrays a tiny fraction of humanity that has immense psychic powers, which they refer to as "The Ability. I don’t even know how long that entire sequence was where our heroes, along with the help of a Philadelphia street gang, were battling Melanie and her minions, but it lasted quite a while and was an epic within an epic, akin to a mid-season finale in a television series. I’m not a chess guy, and you wouldn’t think a chess game, for all intents and purposes, would be exciting as the first of two climaxes to an epic book, but you’d be wrong! I understand exactly how you feel, but you have to remember that the Game is still important to Willi.

You combine the force of character that such a warrior is with agents of the Inquisition and you have the makings of a right explosive story. I will say however that the ending left me more satisfied than I felt at the end of the 3 other aforementioned horror epics. But, as Willi later explains, like sharks trying to protect their feeding zone, they turn on each other. There is no record of the person existing in US Government files, which leads Gentry to begin to believe Saul's incredible story. For Assistant Superintendent David Kubu Bengu, it’s obvious from the start that sinister forces are at work.

The suggestion during the epilogue and the near apocalypse that is avoided sounded far more interesting to me than the last 400 pages we ended up with in this novel. Saul becomes a willing pawn in the "game," having trained himself with self-hypnosis for months to memorize as many details as possible of the lives of death camp victims and survivors of the holocaust so that when Willi attempts to control him, the memories of others will confuse Willi in a way that will gain Saul a few seconds to attack and kill the old man. Add all of the aforementioned together with the fact that, again, these are mind vampires capable of controlling your brain. That brings both Saul and Natalie together to get answers (and for Natalie to learn about the mind vampires), but also Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry, Sheriff of Charleston, South Carolina, who was investigating the inexplicable murders in the melee between Nina and Melanie. The color made her complexion seem even more perfect than usual and brought out the blue of her eyes.

I do not remember the purported cause of the quarrel, perhaps some deliberate misinterpretation of one of Charles’s jokes.Recovering from a nervous breakdown triggered by her father’s death and the loss of her unborn child, her sanity is pushed to the brink when she starts suffering memory lapses. That book was Graeme’s last novel, Ravens Gathering (you can read my review here), and since then, I have had the pleasure of meeting Graeme in person. The victims of the Holocaust were powering Saul forward, literally as he took step after step toward Willi, until he was able to choke Willi to death. But if any of this sounds like your wheelhouse, and it is mine because like Simmons, I’m also deeply fascinated by human violence (intimate and grandiose), with a specific interest in 20th century violence as well, then I highly recommend Carrion Comfort.