Disproportionate Retribution: In Philadelphia, Melanie runs into a group of local gang members, who cuss her out and make fun of her but never actually try to harm her.Melanie in particular has some distressingly backwards views in a number of topics, not least of all race, due to her upbringing in an old money southern family that held fast to antebellum tradition. More mundanely, William was a Nazi officer, and while his fervor for the party was more based around his general love of war and control than ideology, he does subscribe to notions of racial superiority and inferiority. Deliberate Values Dissonance: People with the ability tend to view the rest of humanity as cattle, resulting in plenty of murder and rape, not to mention destroying the human brain through their contact and control.Death of a Child: Melanie and Nina's psychic battle ends with a ten-year-old girl among the numerous people they killed.The nuclear submarine captain Melanie makes chance contact with at the very beginning of the book comes back in the epilogue as someone she's been quietly grooming all this time for a feeding of unrivaled scale.Chekhov's Gunman: Shayla Barrington, a teenage actress raped by Tony Harod near the beginning of the book, is barely ever mentioned again until she reappears at the very end and shoots Harod dead in revenge.The Chessmaster: Barent and the Oberst, both literally and figuratively.Bullying a Dragon: Occurs whenever a normal human crosses someone with the ability, such as the young gang disrespecting Melanie or Willi's ex picking a fight with Harod- though in the latter case he doesn't even use his ability.This is because Melanie's conditioning left him with essentially no consciousness other than a set of violent instincts. The Brute: Vincent is a silent, murderous hulk of a teenage boy who serves as Melanie's hatchet man.She becomes a laughingstock and a scandal, and finally takes her revenge with five shots to Harod's chest. Break the Cutie: Shayla was a good Christian girl with high hopes and strong values before Harod psychically manipulated her performing sex acts on him and spreading the footage around Hollywood.Though the mind vampires are able to mind control virtually anyone, they don't use governments or try to change the world.

Faux Affably Evil: With few exceptions, there is not a shred of actual pleasantness or goodwill behind this behavior.

Affably Evil: Some of the mind vampires, particularly C.

The novelette focuses on Melanie, Willi and Nina, and is a small-scale There Can Be Only One battle.

Adaptation Expansion: The novel started life as a novelette of the same title, published in Omni magazine in 1983.

Getting help from an old concentration camp prisoner, Saul Laski, who was once one of Willi's pawns, they set out to find the truth and if possible kill the mind vampires.Carrion Comfort is a fantasy/horror novel written by Dan Simmons about psychic vampires that secretly control the world (or at least, as much of it as they want to). As the book is starting the old friendship is breaking up and their internal feuding gets a bit out of hand, waking the interest of Sheriff Gentry and Natalie Preston.

The three old mind vampires Willi, Nina and Melanie has been playing a game since before world war II – who can make the most people kill themselves or other people, in the most interesting ways. If you like long books (just about a thousand pages) and horror, you just have to read this one. My only problem with it was that I found some part of it a bit to slow going. Carrion Comfort is one of those books that are so well written and so gripping, that you just have to keep on reading. I'm not sure what kind of expectations I had for this book before I started on it, but I can't say that I was disappointed in any way. Carrion Comfort is a Dan Simmons horror novel, best known for the Hyperion and Endymoin series.Įxcept for the stories in Dark Visions this is the first horror by Dan Simmons that I've read.

Carrion comfort