Dan Simmons Book Comparison Between Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night

Having recently being exposed to the author Dan Simmons, I’ve become entranced in his novels Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night.  These two fantastic novels have put him in the upper echelon of horror writers immediately with an excellent sense of pacing, atmosphere and character development first and foremost among his traits.  These books are both generally suspenseful, but deal with largely different subject matter. 

Carrion Comfort deals with a series of murders that lead the protagonist Saul Laski on the murderers trail.  This leads him into a trail of Nazi encounters we he is imprisoned and eventually escapes with some of the other main characters of the novel.  The interpersonal relationships that are developed between Saul and some of the other characters are fascinating.  There’s also a great deal of interaction between the characters involved with the murders early in the story.  This is novel is fantastic because of its suspenseful nature and historical standpoint.

Summer of Night is the other Dan Simmons novel I read and it’s excellent for different reasons.  It focuses on the relationships between adolescents and a decaying school named Old Central.  There are a few main enemy characters that initially seem good, like the school principal, that end up turning on the kids in the end of the story.  There is also a sense of foreboding evil towards the children as they see things underneath their beds and approaching them in their houses.  I found this book less consistently enthralling than Carrion Comfort, but it had a very exciting conclusion.  Both novels display a great deal of atmosphere and suspense, however.

Both of these books Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night are extremely well-written and make me want to delve further into the works of this author.  There is a swiftly moving plot and a huge amount of atmosphere to be found in both of the books.  I had an enormous amount of fun with both, but I would have to choose Carrion Comfort as the favourite because of its more mature approach.