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busy to go to meetings or take any active role. That didn’t help when he refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and he became one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten.” In 1950 he went to jail for a year.
    There are only two things that I imagine I have in common with Dalton Trumbo. First, we were both fast writers. (He churned out
Roman Holiday
using writer Ian McLellan Hunter as a “front” name and Hunter won an Oscar for the script. Trumbo went on to write
Spartacus
,
Exodus
,
Papillon
, and many other award-winning movies under his own name.) The second thing I believe Trumbo and I had in common was a fascination with the kind of evil and violence that comes from exerting one’s will over another person.
    Trumbo’s unfinished
Night of the Aurochs
, which was published posthumously and that I read only after writing
Carrion Comfort
, was his attempt to explain the darkest parts of human nature that led to the Holocaust (and to the inevitable future Holocausts we’re hurtling toward). Aurochs were a now-extinct shaggy, stupid, wild European ox.
    Night of the Aurochs
is written, at least partially, in the form of a first-person autobiography of a young Nazi named Grieban who eventually becomes the commandant at Auschwitz.
    Grieban, as is true of most monsters, does not consider himself a monster. Much of his first-person narrative is an attempt to defend the Third Reich’s Final Solution as something no more sinister than the Confederate States attempt to prevent racial miscegenation. He sees himself as a sort of Robert E. Lee in the cause of defending racial purity.
    In truth, of course, Grieban is a mind vampire. It’s not racial purity that he seeks, but power over other people. And nowhere in the recent history of our species has the scourge of mind vampirism spread so quickly and completely as it did in Europe from 1936 to 1945.
    It’s been decades since I’ve read
Night of the Aurochs
but I remember one scene early on where Grieban, narrating, tells of the time when he is a young teenager and he takes his innocent, blonde, Aryan, sweet little female cousin out into the woods. Once there, Grieban realizes he has total control over his little eight-or nine-year-old cousin.
    Crouch, he orders her. Frightened, she crouches. Take your under-pants off, he orders her. She complies. Now, pee, he commands.
    Eventually, terrified, she does.
    Grieban is sexually excited as he watches his little girl-cousin urinate in front of him, not because of her exposure, but because of his power over her. He realizes then that under the right circumstances, a person can make other people
do anything you want them to
. The idea excites him to orgasm, both then and later in Auschwitz.
    It’s a sick idea. It’s also— I believe— an important truth.
    Absolute power does more than corrupt us absolutely, it gives us the blood-power taste of total control. Such control is more addicting than heroin. It is the addiction of mind vampirism.
    When I read the unfinished first draft that was Trumbo’s
Night of the Aurochs
, I knew that it had been worth it to write and to fight for
Carrion Comfort
, even if my own book would never be published.
    When I realized that my editor and publisher in 1986–1987 were never going to get around to figuring out or publishing my novel, I got busy.
    Even before arranging to buy back
Carrion Comfort
from them, I’d started writing my brains out. The hardest part that first solo autumn of 1987 was simply realizing that I was technically
unemployed
. The thought made me crazy. I’d worked my way through college and graduate school and worked as a teacher ever since. The idea of having no job to go off to, no income to depend on— none at all— was terrifying. (Karen remained calmer than I did, even as we ate up our last seed corn in terms of our PERA retirement money. Knowing that there are fewer than five hundred full-time writers— writers who actually make a