Children of the Night by Dan Simmons – Review

August 9, 2009 at 7:24 am (Books, Horror)

Before I begin this review I want to mention that there will definitely be spoilers for the first third of the book. For those of you who want to enter this with a clean slate, let me just say this, “it was scary, go read it.”

William Jones, editor for Chaosium and Elder Signs Press recently posted a blog entry (at http://www.williamsramblings.blogspot.com/ ) in which he said:

“It has been argued by a few that Stoker created a creature of his time. A metaphor representing aristocracy ( The Count), and that metaphor was seen to also be a parasite – the landed/gentry living off the life energy (labor) of the common folk. Certainly the political and social atmosphere of the time viewed the aristocracy as a dying or dead social class. And that is part of the basis for such a reading.

Now, if we were to read the Stoker vampire in that fashion, it begs the question: How has it changed? Is it still tied to classism? Or has it become something different?”

In the following review I will attempt to show how, at least for Mr. Simmons, the theme of classism has not changed, but simply matured to fit our modern world.

The first book I read by Dan Simmons, The Song of Kali, I had mixed feelings about. It was certainly a successful exercise in horror and managed to employ an exotic setting to full effect, evoking ideas of disorientation and ignorance as powerlessness in ways that H.P. Lovecraft could only have hoped to achieve. Yet, because of that, I was unsettled by The Song of Kali. There was a racism inherent there, a fear of “foreign-ness” that did not sit well with me. I was impressed with Simmons, without a doubt, but I did not know if I liked him.

Children of the Night dispelled these concerns for me, while also being a novel that concentrated on the horror of being hunted in a remote third-world hell, much like The Song of Kali. Simmons novel takes place in Romania directly after Ceauşescu’s reign was ended in the ’89 revolution. For those of you unfamiliar with Ceauşescu, Simmons fills in a lot of the gory details but suffice it to say that he gave ol’ Vlad a run for his money on brutality and horror.

As Simmons sets the stage for the novel, I felt like I was in for a very similar ride to The Song of Kali. Bombed-out streets, despicable living conditions, a dangerously lean and hungry populace. Life is scary outside the US, got it. However, I realized that Simmons had something more ambitious in mind when I read the following exchange between an American entrepreneur and his Romanian liaison:

****

He held his hand out toward the factory. The lines in his palm were already black with soot, the cuff of his white shirt a dark gray. “Ceauşescu gone now. Factory no longer have to turn out rubber things for East Germany, Poland, U.S.S.R . . . you want? Make things your company want? No . . . how do you say . . . no environmental impactment states, no regulations against making things the way you want, throwing away things where you want. So, you want?”

I stood there in the black snow for a long moment and might have stood there longer if the train had not shrieked its two-minute warning. “Perhaps,” I said. “Just perhaps.”

****

It was at this moment the narrative began to truly click with me. I’m certainly not the first person to note my discomfort over The Song of Kali. Here, Simmons responds to his critics with a searing commentary: “Yes, the third world is horrible. However, it horrors exist because we demand them. Global industry desires these conditions to maximize profit margins. You shouldn’t be so repulsed, Dr. Frankenstein. It’s your monster.”

This theme is further reinforced when it turns out our industrialist-narrator is, in fact, Vlad Dracul himself returned to his homeland after years away in the United States, an immortal blood-sucker turned business mogul. Now, while Vampire: the Masquerade would popularize the idea of the bourgeoisie-vampire over the next several years, it is important to note that Simmons here is taking a radical new approach to make a commentary on global capitalism.

If Children of the Night was a one-trick pony, however, it wouldn’t have much to recommend it. Luckily, this is not the case. Simmons carefully divides the novel into three sections, each of them with a distinctive feel all their own without ever seeming disconnected from one another. The first third, setting the stage for the rest of the novel, concentrates on setting a black mood of horror and despair, focusing on how “vampires” have managed to turn the once-beautiful state of Romania into one of the most brutal places to live on Earth.

Once the novel returns to America, the tone changes rapidly. Here, Simmons takes a radically different approach to vampirism and provides a welcome respite from the bleak atmosphere that permeates the first third of the book. Instead, we have a medical drama that zeroes in on a scientific cause for the vampiric condition. Now, I can hear some of you in the bleachers groaning already, and I want to assure you that this has nothing to do with “midichlorians” or other types of hokey pseudo-science. Instead, Simmons delivers a credible and interesting theory on how the blood-suckers could exist while managing to stay at a level that most readers could follow.

Of course, Simmons knows that while we might find political commentary and medical mysteries interesting, his audience signed up for a vampire novel. Which means we expect some pulse-pounding action and some bloody frightening horror. In the final third of Children of the Night he delivers on this implicit promise, and in spades. The last hundred pages becomes a case of “endurance horror”, where the protagonist (like those in Inside and High Tension) is faced with so many frightful trials that you wonder if she could go on any longer. Yet, Simmons shows a masterful hand, ratcheting the tension steadily but allowing for interludes of relative stability in which we (and the characters) are allowed a chance to breathe. Throughout, our heroine undergoes a harrowing series of fights, chases, and betrayals in an unbelievable journey for vengeance that pushed all my geek buttons just right.