Carrion Comfort Read Free

then I got to work writing
Carrion Comfort
, the epic novel. (I had warned Jim Frenkel from the beginning that it would be a large, large book. I was young, at least as a writer, and I had a lot to say about violence and about those who impose their will on us. The tale would begin with the Holocaust and work its way right up into the violence of the terrible 1980s, a decade that began with the murder of John Lennon, as well as the shooting of the pope and the American president.)
    Reader, which is the worst mind vampire you’ve ever encountered?
    Was it a pettifogging boss who made your employment a living hell as he or she got off on exerting control over you in your work or profession, ruining your own plea sure in that work?
    Was it a lover who turned the most sacred things in life into tools of leverage over your heart and mind and life and emotions?
    Was it someone you were sure would be your mentor who turned out to be a monster?
    Was it one of your own children who devoted his or her young life to controlling
your
life with demands and confrontations and scenes and tantrums?
    Or was it someone you would never have expected to be of the mind-vampire variety— the lurker in the shadows, the stranger soul-drainer hiding and gathering its strength while it waited for you to enter its web?
    I had less than a year to write
Carrion Comfort
in 1985–1986. For an eager young novelist, it seemed plenty of time.
    I was still working eighty and more hours a week on APEX, of course, but that was no problem. evenings, weekends, watching TV with Karen and little Jane, going to movies, outings, trips, everything disappeared. I wrote the first draft longhand on yellow legal pads late into the night. In the morning I rose early— I often had to leave to supervise the APEX buses of kids before 6:30 A.M. and classes started shortly after 7 A.M. —and would madly type up the chapters finished the night before. My big expenditure at that time was a used and repaired IBM Selectric typewriter purchased from a rental place. It was a huge decision to spend that much money on technology, but my old, small Olivetti typewriter just couldn’t keep up with the demands of typing out multiple drafts of what became a fifteen-hundred-plus-page mega-novel.
    The story for
Carrion Comfort
was so complex— at least for me— and the cast of characters so large, that for the first and only time in my writing career, the walls of my tiny extra-bedroom-turned-office were covered with long strips of brown paper on which I’d tracked the actions, interactions, and ultimate fates of the many characters in lines of different-colored magic marker. Melanie Fuller, I remember, was red. Saul Laski was blue. Nina Drayton was a brief yellow. Tony Harod was a billious green. The Oberst, Willi, was a thick Nazi black. Up and down all my study’s walls ran a riot of dozens of colored lines, crossing, crisscrossing, with scribbled notes at the junctions and important points. Sometimes the lines terminated with a terrible suddenness where the character died. The ceiling-to-floor strips of scribbled butcher paper looked like a seismometer’s readout run amuck.
    All around me, day after day through that autumn and winter and spring, were growing stacks of filled yellow legal pads, taller stacks of reference books and maps, and growing mountains of multiple-typed drafts of
Carrion Comfort
. From time to time I kept Jim Frenkel apprised of how large the book was going to be. “No problem,” was the only response I got from my publisher-editor.
    The book was due in the autumn of 1986. That summer, I hired our APEX secretary, Arleen, to work for me from her own home, daily typing up my revised revisions of the retyped and revised chapters I continued to churn out. I not only had fifty or sixty legal pads filled with scribbles and X-outs and revisions now, I also had four or more two-and-a-half-foot-tall heaps of my own typed manuscripts.
    That summer I worked between