Children of the Night

Dan Simmons

The first few chapters of Simmon's "Children of the Night" takes place in Romania and the residing countryside. In those pages, you explore the Romanian orphanages and Simmons takes up the needle and begins to sew together a plot which involves the warehoused orphans, Vlad Dracula, and the CDC in Boulder, Colorado. Present to past, to past to present. This all works very well, keeps the reader turning pages, and then he takes his main character, a female doctor, back to the United States with an orphaned infant in tow. You know where this is going and that's the big problem Simmons runs into. At this point, the needle gets dropped and the tapestry begins to unwind. All of a sudden you're dealing with very wooden characters thrown into bizarre circumstances to which they react with a modicum on interest or surprise. The plotting takes on a flatness which Simmons seems to try to overcome with verbose injections of medical terminology in blood pathology. It just stopped working for me. However, with all due respect to Simmons, don't let this novel persuade you away from him. As the Rev and ian and I have already disclosed here, he has some great works out there, but this is not one of them. Go find Carrion Comfort or Song of Kali, or the book of short stories ian mentioned. Me, I'm off to John Dunning land and Booked to Die, the acknowledgment alone is a wealth.