Dan Simmons

Carrion Comfort Dan Simmons Unabridged edition

The Past...
Caught behind the lines of Hitler?s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face-to-face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazis themselves....

The Present...
Compelled by the encounter to survive at all costs, so begins a journey that for Saul will span decades and cross continents, plunging into the darkest corners of twentieth-century history to reveal a secret society of beings who throughout the ages may exist behind the world?s most horrible and violent events. Killing from a distance, they are people with the psychic ability to ?use? humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, and force them to acts of unspeakable aggression. Each year, three of the most powerful of this hidden order meet to discuss their triumphs of bloodshed and destruction. But at this reunion, something will go terribly wrong. Saul?s quest is about to reach its elusive object, drawing hunter and hunted alike into a struggle that will plumb the depths of mankind?s attraction to violence, and determine the future of the world itself.

?[Carrion Comfort is] one of the few major reinventions of the vampire concept, on a par with Jack Finney?s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Richard Matheson?s I Am Legend, and Stephen King?s Salem?s Lot.? ? DAVID MORRELL