There's already a blood bath by page 50 and a main character is killed off half way with the whole thing becoming more and more preposterous. ( )

Of the Dan Simmons that I have read I must say that this is my favorite. ( )

Good but quite an odd duck.

The general plot and various climaxes are the stuff of thrillers, but the rythm and length of the book aren't really those of a thriller. It's a pretty massive book and you spend 90% of that time in protagonists' and antagonists' heads building up to those and experiencing them in minute detail, sometime from multiple perspectives.
The choice of characters is pretty archetypal (a bit unfortunately ?).
Most of the antagonists are also pretty fun choices for an author who later did such a political U-turn, there's a televangelist, an old maid who lives 200% in the past and can't even /see/ the individuality of people of color she interacts with because in her head they're all still slaves and servant material, all pretty thoroughly roasted. ( )

This sweeping historical fantasy imagines a world in which an infinitesimally small subset of humans has evolved the ability to control others with their minds. Our protagonist, Saul Laski, first encountered this evil while an inmate in a concentration camp. He found himself a literal pawn in a game of chess played with humans piloted around by two of these creatures. As pieces were captured, they were executed.

Having narrowly escaped this harrowing event with his life, Saul devotes himself to two things: survival, and the destruction of the creature that once controlled his mind. Saul's journey will culminate in the discovery of a secret enclave of these mind vampires who meet up annually to play this fatal game. Moreover, the small club is in the midst of an internal power struggle that will throw the fate of the world into the balance.

Along the way, Saul will collect allies, a small town sheriff who is investigating a bizarre massacre that is linked to Saul's investigations. The other, the daughter of an innocent bystander who is determined to bring the killer of her father to justice.

In the end, Saul will need every advantage at his disposal if he can hope to defeat the grisly terror from his nightmares.

Alas, I did not find this book particularly riveting. It is really quite long, and I often felt that it didn't need to be. We spend a lot of time getting to know some of the vampires. We spend lots if time in their heads listening to their inner monologues which mainly serve the purpose of convincing the reader that they are evil, which is silly and a waste of time. We also spend lots of time watching them do terrible crimes, or deliver hateful speeches to each other. It got tedious after awhile, and there seemed to be an unpleasant reveling in the evil of it all that seemed in poor taste.

Some of the rape scenes which were rendered in excruciating detail seemed to be exploitative and sensualized in a repulsive way. It seemed to invite the (male) reader to enter into the fantasy of raping women without fear of consequence.

The racist screeds of Melanie are likewise reveled in and presented in a way that give the impression that while she may be evil she might also have a few points?

Likewise, the fat southern preacher has a graphic sex scene with another male vampire and this seemed to be presented as a provocation to make the reader go, "EWW, gross! They're evil AND gay!" The sexuality of these two characters is not explored at any other point in the book, but seemed to be used only in this scene to underscore their truly base nature.

Even if I'm reading into this and the author himself doesn't subscribe to these amoral views, I would at the very least say that he's terrible at writing villains. This is a book composed primarily of villains. I love a good villain, and these are not good villains. The author just seemed to be trying to outdo himself with imagining repugnant qualities to give them. But they have no motives, no drive, no real personality. They are just "bad". They are not complex which makes them boring, which makes most of the book boring because we spend a lot of time with them.

I would not recommend reading this massive tome to anyone. There's much better horror out there. ( )

I was going to say that I didn't like it. But I did finish it, and I didn't think the time on it was wasted. Most of the time anyway.