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On the theory that this thread isn't so much dead as pining for the fjords, I'll go ahead and say I randomly picked up Carrion Comfort last week after having Hyperion on my TBR list for a while and having heard about Simmons' reportedly successful genre-hopping. If I hadn't finished up Stephen Greenblat's The Swerve in mid-train-ride and been guided by the limited selection on my tablet and the vagaries of the moment, I doubt I would have picked up that author or title any time soon.
I'm a couple hundred pages into the doorstop and enjoying the characters which manage to feel real despite also being stereotypes, or deliberate attempts to avoid stereotyping (which tends to amount to the same thing). We seem to be moving toward an epic scale of events where it's genuinely hard to see how our heroes (country-dumb Southern sheriff, holocaust survivor, and artistic Negro college girl--where's the Latino gangster with a heart of gold?) can even make a dent, much less prevail.
I may be way off here, but there seems to be a strong undercurrent of BDSM sensibility, particularly in the depiction of Tony Harod who, yes, is a creepy rapey bastard so we can hate him, but also provides an excuse for repeated scenes of sexual domination.
Anyway, those are the chunky bits that stand out of the narrative, but it's still compelling. The preoccupation with Israel/Judaism and dominance relationships could easily be seen as prefiguring the sharp right turn that people are saying informs his later work.
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