Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Goo—” I said. There was supposed to be a “d” on the end of that word, but before I could finish the syllable, I was listening again.

  “I’m going to create a new dynasty of horror fiction with this house,” my editor said. “A sort of empire. I’m going to raise the bar all across the field. I haven’t seen this book of yours, we didn’t buy this book of yours, so it’ll just have to mea sure up— after my editing— or it won’t be on the list.”

  “Goo—”

  I said. “I know the general idea of your book . . . sort of a ripoff of Robinson’s

  The Power . . . but I’m not convinced that the premise can support a manuscript of that size.” She gave my giant box of pages a baleful, critical look.

  I couldn’t say “Good” or even “Goo—” to that, so I said nothing. “We’ll see if it measures up,” she said. And then I drank my Coke while she told me about the gifted programs she’d been in at school and about her meteoric rise in the publishing business.

  My wife Karen was at the banquet after all when Song of Kali won the World Fantasy Award the next day. After I’d left, she’d borrowed money from her brother for the ticket fare. I loved having her there when Song of Kali was announced the winner.

  And now I’m going to write about something that will make Karen hit me with a closed fist.

  As a matter of policy, I don’t write about people’s negative appearances (especially women’s), even in my fiction. (Except for certain monsters.) I’m living proof that people can’t really help their appearance in most cases— their looks, their weight, the occasional gaffes on wardrobe.

  But at that awards banquet in 1986, my new editor sitting with us became a living meta phor for the next eighteen months of my life— some of the worst months I’ve ever had— and that meta phor, sadly, deserves the telling.

  My new editor was short and overweight and very, very pale, all of which is irrelevant save for her choice of apparel that afternoon. She was wearing tiny black bikini underpants and a black bra and no slip or other undergarments, and I can report this because her “gown” that day was a sort of black-mesh body stocking with large open diamonds everywhere. It reminded me of a fish net that my dad and I used when fishing in the Illinois River or on Minnesota lakes when I was a small kid. (Once a large-diameter eel I caught oozed right through the large net openings, but I didn’t notice because, thinking I’d hooked a giant snake, I’d turned around and started running full speed in the opposite direction. My dad caught me by the back of my belt as I left the boat that time and swung me back in, even as the eel oozed back into the river through the net.)

  Anyway, such a garment could be mildly disconcerting at the best of times, but in this case the mesh-bodystocking dress-thing was far too small for her and her pale flesh was oozing out through the black-mesh diamonds everywhere.

  Trying not to be a sexist jerk through my adult years, I’m pretty good at maintaining eye contact with women no matter what the reality is before the eye-gaze line, but this black-mesh spiderweb gown all but defeated my efforts. There was no aspect of sexiness involved. It was as if my new editor had been caught in a spider’s web that was contracting, closing, tightening, and squeezing its occupant to death. All I could think at the time was—That has to be uncomfortable.

  Later, I realized that the black web she wore that day was a metaphor. But not for her, for me.

  And that particular web would continue to tighten around me for many months to come.

  When Karen and I returned from Providence that autumn I told her about the major editing and revision job ahead. We decided that I should do the most I could do to help the editor with the big job on Carrion Comfort that obviously lay ahead of us.

  Because the last few hours of my long, long APEX day consisted of visiting one or more of the nineteen schools we supervised ser vices in, I was able to arrange to go “half time” for the next semester starting in January of 1987. What that really meant was that I was still putting in about eight hours a day and eighty hours a week on APEX, but would go half pay in order to gain a couple of hours for myself on weekday afternoons. I would use that time working on the revision suggestions on Carrion Comfort that would be coming from my new publisher and editor before Christmas of 1986.

  Karen and I couldn’t really afford this half-pay situation— my salary was still our primary income, we had a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old mortgage on a tiny house we’d been brave enough to purchase when it looked as if writing novels would be augmenting my teaching salary— but it seemed like the right thing to do. Besides, we told each other, there’s that $6,500 jackpot of half of the remaining half of the advance we’d be receiving when I finished the rewrites to my new editor’s satisfaction and, somewhere far, far beyond that, an equal amount upon publication.

  So, shocking my teaching colleagues and the school-district brass, I took the half pay for 90 percent APEX work situation to gain those two or three hours each late workday. My editor’s “extensive revision suggestions” were promised to arrive before Thanksgiving.

  But they didn’t arrive before Thanksgiving of 1986. Nor before Christmas.

  I continued teaching full-time on half pay and waiting.

  The revision suggestions didn’t arrive by Easter of 1987. Nor by April or early May.

  Finally, close to the end of the regular school year (for which I’d done almost full work for half pay), the letters (this was pre-e-mail, remember) from my editor began pouring in.

  She lived up to her word: the pages were single-spaced and many. The first revision-suggestion letter ran to something like sixteen pages.

  But the revision suggestions were almost impossible to decode. They contradicted each other. Most of all, I understood at once, she wanted Carrion Comfort much shorter, and I certainly understood the publisher’s need for that. It was a very long book, difficult to produce at that length. Although when I spoke to Robert R. “Rick” McCammon, publisher of the equally huge horror hit, Swan Song, about this time, Rick said that unit cost on a large book, beyond about five hundred pages, wasn’t that great. He said that publishers were simply wary of such a large novel, unless Stephen King had written it (and they’d had Steve cut more than sixty thousand words of The Stand.)

  At any rate, I wrestled with the contradictory suggestions, trying to cut Carrion Comfort while keeping the soul of the book intact, but it wasn’t really possible. The next twenty-page editorial missive would arrive and now my editor was telling me—“Cut out all the Holocaust stuff. It’s not really germane to the real story and just slows things down.”

  Not germane to the real story?

  To me, the Holocaust aspect of the novel was the real story.

  I’d been deeply interested in—“obsessed by” is not too strong a phrase— the impact of the Holocaust since I was in high school. In college I’d done in de pen dent research, in German, on the creation and deployment of the Einsatzgruppen, the so-called “Special Action Groups,” made up largely of former policeman, civil servants, and even teachers, responsible for the mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front.

  How could some of the most presumably civilized people in an advanced civilization in the modern age be turned to such barbarism?

  To me, the Holocaust— with Germany’s unholy mating of the power of a modern industrial state with all its bureaucratic and technological means with the goal of genocide— was nothing less than the apotheosis of evil in our time. It was, without doubt, the central fact and lesson of the twentieth century.

  And it was the guts and sinew and soul of Carrion Comfort. “Cut it,” wrote my editor when I explained this.

  I worked through the summer trying to rewrite and shorten and placate without eviscerating or emasculating the book. Nothing pleased my editor. After nine months of this, I felt as if I were the one caught in an ever-tightening web.

  The editorial suggestions kept coming.

  By summer of 1987, the new editorial suggestion
was—“Rewrite it as two books.”

  I might have done that if I could, but the break between the two would have been artificial and false. It would have felt like one of the old Saturday movie serials from the era before me, one which always ended in a fake cliff-hanger. I simply couldn’t do it.

  At the end of the summer of 1987, events threw a new curve at me. The school district administrators in order to show (in their words) that “all teachers were interchangeable” and “it doesn’t take a gifted person to teach gifted kids” announced that they were going to rotate APEX designers/ curriculum writers/coordinators/teachers back to the regular classroom and select their successors more or less at random.

  I loved teaching. I’d loved teaching in the regular classroom. But I knew a simple secret that the district administrators didn’t— namely that it did require gifted people to teach profoundly gifted kids (and to write the appropriate curriculum for them)— so I knew that APEX, the most profoundly creative and successful thing I’d ever accomplished, would die when they brought in teachers not able or willing to put in the time and creativity to keep it going.

  So Karen and I made perhaps the riskiest and boldest decision of our life together: I would resign from teaching and write full-time. True, we didn’t seem any closer to that elusive $6,500 for the accepted Carrion Comfort than we’d been a year earlier and my constant rewritings to please the unpleasable female editor were keeping me from beginning other novels or even writing many short stories, but if I were to write full-time. . . .

  It was an insane choice. So we made it. That autumn, for the first time since I’d gone off to kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t go to school come September. It was, to put it mildly, a traumatic separation.

  And into September and October the waiting for clear editorial direction went on. It began to dawn on me that this new publisher had little or no vested interest in Carrion Comfort; they hadn’t selected it, hadn’t paid for it, but had merely inherited it as a sort of payment from a defunct, short-lived house that owed them money. Nor did the young editor who’d sent me so many (incomprehensible, undo-able) single-space pages over the last fourteen months have much vested interest in Carrion Comfort. Her job was to remake the entire field of horror fiction and make her house the preeminent purveyor of the new genre, not “fix” this long, sprawling almost-unknown writer’s huge manuscript.

  In late October of 1987, I panicked. Even though school had started more than two months earlier, I flew out to Massachussetts— one of the few states that takes gifted/talented education seriously— and looked for G/T-coordinator jobs in the Boston area. The competition for such jobs there was cutthroat. Teachers and administrators with Ph.D.’s routinely competed for such positions

  After getting three offers of coordinator positions in districts around Boston, I returned to Colorado. Karen and I decided that since it seemed that I could get better employment than my old teaching job if necessary, I should defer that lifeboat for now and concentrate on getting Carrion Comfort published and on writing more novels.

  We began living on our meager savings and then on our PERA— teacher retirement money. I remember the early winter day when we celebrated, dancing around as if I’d sold another book, when I found a couple of hundred dollars of mine in old Missouri and New York teacher retirement funds.

  In the truest sense, we were eating our seed corn.

  Early in 1988, more than eighteen months after the editorial relationship began, my editor sent me her final suggestion on the matter— “Keep the title Carrion Comfort, throw everything else out. Start over from scratch.”

  That was it.

  I’d wasted a year and a half of my writing time and lost half of my teacher’s pay and left my real profession. For nothing.

  I called my agent Richard Curtis and said that I was going to buy my book back from this publisher. I didn’t have any money at the moment, but I was making arrangements to sell our house so that I could write a check to buy the book back and. . . .

  Richard explained that I wouldn’t be writing any check. He’d arrange the buy-back contract for Carrion Comfort so that the bulk of the $12,500 we’d repay would come only after I found a new publisher for the book.

  It was a temporary relief.

  Of course, I didn’t believe I’d ever find a new publisher for the book.

  Dalton Trumbo, author of the ultimate antiwar novel and movie Johnny Got His Gun, didn’t live to finish his last novel, Night of the Aurochs.

  Trumbo was born in 1905 and grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, a town I know pretty well. Inspired by a newspaper article about a British officer who was horribly disfigured in the Great War, Trumbo managed to get Johnny Got His Gun published in 1939. (Ironically, Johnny Got His Gun, perhaps the most unrelenting antiwar novel to that time or since, was most popular in Japan right before World War II, even as that nation gave itself up totally to militarism and aggression. Perhaps for this reason, Trumbo himself later said that he was happy his little book had gone out of print by the time the United States entered the war. He then wrote the script for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the story of Jimmy Dolittle’s April 1942 raid, starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson.)

  In 1943, Trumbo joned the Communist Party but was soon too busy to go to meetings or take any active role. That didn’t help when he refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and he became one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten.” In 1950 he went to jail for a year.

  There are only two things that I imagine I have in common with Dalton Trumbo. First, we were both fast writers. (He churned out Roman Holiday using writer Ian McLellan Hunter as a “front” name and Hunter won an Oscar for the script. Trumbo went on to write Spartacus, Exodus, Papillon, and many other award-winning movies under his own name.) The second thing I believe Trumbo and I had in common was a fascination with the kind of evil and violence that comes from exerting one’s will over another person.

  Trumbo’s unfinished Night of the Aurochs, which was published posthumously and that I read only after writing Carrion Comfort, was his attempt to explain the darkest parts of human nature that led to the Holocaust (and to the inevitable future Holocausts we’re hurtling toward). Aurochs were a now-extinct shaggy, stupid, wild European ox.

  Night of the Aurochs is written, at least partially, in the form of a first-person autobiography of a young Nazi named Grieban who eventually becomes the commandant at Auschwitz.

  Grieban, as is true of most monsters, does not consider himself a monster. Much of his first-person narrative is an attempt to defend the Third Reich’s Final Solution as something no more sinister than the Confederate States attempt to prevent racial miscegenation. He sees himself as a sort of Robert E. Lee in the cause of defending racial purity.

  In truth, of course, Grieban is a mind vampire. It’s not racial purity that he seeks, but power over other people. And nowhere in the recent history of our species has the scourge of mind vampirism spread so quickly and completely as it did in Europe from 1936 to 1945.

  It’s been decades since I’ve read Night of the Aurochs but I remember one scene early on where Grieban, narrating, tells of the time when he is a young teenager and he takes his innocent, blonde, Aryan, sweet little female cousin out into the woods. Once there, Grieban realizes he has total control over his little eight-or nine-year-old cousin.

  Crouch, he orders her. Frightened, she crouches. Take your under-pants off, he orders her. She complies. Now, pee, he commands.

  Eventually, terrified, she does.

  Grieban is sexually excited as he watches his little girl-cousin urinate in front of him, not because of her exposure, but because of his power over her. He realizes then that under the right circumstances, a person can make other people do anything you want them to. The idea excites him to orgasm, both then and later in Auschwitz.

  It’s a sick idea. It’s also— I believe— an important truth.

  Absolute power does more than corrupt us absolutely
, it gives us the blood-power taste of total control. Such control is more addicting than heroin. It is the addiction of mind vampirism.

  When I read the unfinished first draft that was Trumbo’s Night of the Aurochs, I knew that it had been worth it to write and to fight for Carrion Comfort, even if my own book would never be published.

  When I realized that my editor and publisher in 1986–1987 were never going to get around to figuring out or publishing my novel, I got busy.

  Even before arranging to buy back Carrion Comfort from them, I’d started writing my brains out. The hardest part that first solo autumn of 1987 was simply realizing that I was technically unemployed. The thought made me crazy. I’d worked my way through college and graduate school and worked as a teacher ever since. The idea of having no job to go off to, no income to depend on— none at all— was terrifying. (Karen remained calmer than I did, even as we ate up our last seed corn in terms of our PERA retirement money. Knowing that there are fewer than five hundred full-time writers— writers who actually make a living just on their writing of fiction— out of a population of 300 million Americans, she still remained confident that things would work out for my writing career and us. Or at least she said she did . . . and she convinced me.)

  With Richard Curtis looking for another publisher who might want a thousand page (in print) major horror novel about violence from a relatively unknown writer, I simply kept writing new fiction.

  I wrote Phases of Gravity, a novel about the philosophical and epistemological midlife crisis of a former Apollo astronaut who’d walked on the moon but realized now that it had felt like just another simulation.

  I wrote the SF novel Hyperion— an expansive, big-canvas, Jack Vanceish science fiction tale written in the decade when SF had gotten small and tight and noir and cyberpunkish.

  I knew that the full tale of Hyperion would be another fifteen-hundred-page book but I decided never to go through that struggle for publication again, at least not until I had some clout behind me as a writer to get it published in one volume. I immediately began the second part of the tale in a “sequel” I called The Fall of Hyperion.