Book Reviews: Three Dan Simmons novels: Summer of Night, A Winter Haunting, Children of the Night

.
These three novels are horror stories by Dan Simmons, and they are part of a very loosely related series. Summer of Night (1991) is the first one, which should be read first, and it introduces us to all of the characters when they are kids in 1960. The other two, Children of the Night (1992) and A Winter Haunting (2002), each take up the story of one of these kids as adults. Other Simmons novels also mention more of these kids as adults.
.
Summer of Night occurs in small town America in 1960. Our characters are 11 or 12 years old, a group of friends in Elm Haven, Illinois. They have a club called The Bike Patrol and they enjoy all the innocence of summer, playing baseball and swimming, until some increasingly creepy things happen and they learn that there is profound evil in the world. There are hints of ancient curses implicating the brutal Renaissance Borgia family. As are all Simmons tales, it is a great read.
.
The direct sequel is A Winter Haunting, although it was published a decade later (2002). One of the main Bike Patrol kids, Dale Stewart, is now a troubled adult 40 years later, and he is somehow compelled to return to Elm Haven even though he does not consciously remember the events of 1960. This novel was chilling. Before reading it one should read Summer of Night.
.
In Children of the Night (1992) we find a former Bike Patrol kid, adult Mike O’Rourke, as a wounded Vietnam vet and now a Catholic priest, and he is called to look into some strange occurrences in post-communist Romania. He finds orphanages with staggering amounts of HIV infections (as in fact there was). Romania and Transylvania are loaded with legends of Dracula and vampirism. Can such evil be involved in our story? This novel can stand alone by itself without any prior reading of the Simmons corpus.
.
Simmons continues to astound me. I read anything he writes.
.
-Zenwind.