Drood by Dan Simmons
(2009-02-16)
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February 2009
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN 978-0316007023
784 Pages
http://www.dansimmons.com
Already an acknowledged master at his craft (Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, British Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award), Dan Simmons may have written his most accomplished novel in Drood. The novel gives readers what could be a bird eye view on Charles Dickens during the last five years of his life following the writer near fatal rail crash. While the novel does center on those years, it is through the eyes of Dickens Wilkie Collins, a successful novelist in his own right and prot嶲?and friend to Dickens and in Collins mind rival.
At the outset, Collins seems a rather affable, if slightly proud individual. Considering the critical and financial success he attained, Collins is probably allowed some leeway in feeling good about what he does. As the novel progresses, Collins becomes a more self-important, pretentious, arrogant, spiteful, and bitter individual. This only made the novel all the more addictive and difficult to put down, much like the laudanum Collins consumes in greater quantities as the story progresses.
But, what of Dickens? Well, the story truly becomes more about Collins than Dickens and much of the power Dickens holds over Collins. Collins both loves Dickens and seeks his approval, but comes to despise and wish death upon the great writer. In many ways, I was reminded of how Gollum/Smeagol felt about the One Ring and himself. Dickens is inescapable throughout the novel. His presence is felt even in his absence, as Collins cannot stop thinking about him. Throughout the novel, Dickens comes across as a larger-than-life character, with an affable, confident nature that is like a sun in a galaxy, ever drawing people to him to share in his power. Many times in the novel, Collins refers to Dickens by one of his nicknames, the Inimitable, for that is truly the feel Simmons evokes for Dickens. There is and can only be one Dickens and what he is in the novel is the epitome of Cult of Personality ?he works the media, he works the crowd, and is able to convince the engender the general populace to side with him in a divorce he initiated because of his passion for another woman.
But what of Drood? Even more so than Dickens, his absence for a majority of the narrative is a looming thing. With only Collins as our source of information, just who or what Drood is comes into question for a majority of the novel. Early on it becomes relatively clear that Wilkie Collins is one of a long line of Unreliable Narrators. Dickens tells Collins he came across the person of Drood amidst the wreckage of the infamous Staplehurst Rail crash of 1865 in which 10 people died and 40 were injured. Drood, through Collins relay of Dickens account, comes across as almost a Grim-Reaper figure, but is much more than that. His presence haunts Collins narrative as a sometimes figure of evil, retribution, injustice, death, and the unknown.
Many of the flaws in Collins character, in a "who he is" sense rather than "a person in a story" sense, are what help to make him such an engaging narrator. It bears repeating what an arrogant man he comes across as because it isn a major element at the outset of the novel. This progression and inflation of his ego is paralleled with the increasing amounts of laudanum Collins ingests to offset his rheumatic gout, a form of arthritis. Collins speaks of a ghostly doppelg鄚ger who has visited him for most of his life. Clearly, Collins is not only unreliable as a narrator, but can considered unstable in general.
The feel of the novel is rich and exquisitely evokes Victorian London. Since I can really travel back in time to check on Simmon veracity in his ability to evoke the time and place, I can only go with my gut and it tells me Simmons hit the mark in this respect. In that sense, the novel haunted feel is only strengthened by the time and place ?an era of gaslights, trains and a world at the cusp of vast technological change. The London of Drood, especially the London nights, is very much hidden in shadows with smoke ound the corner and hints of danger and otherworldy Underworlds.
Both Collins and Dickens take mythic journeys in this novel, most notably to the Underworld of London. A vast cavern of tunnels underneath the great city where day laborers live in abject poverty and opium dens are visited by men of society, including Collins. It is a dangerous place, a place where vagrants live, where "lost boys" roam the catacombs, and where the dark figure of Drood and his two steersmen usher Dickens on a gondola to the deepest recesses of Underworld. The mythic parallels to Charon, and more explicitly, the Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis are evocative and resonant in their power. Here again, Collins role as Unreliable Narrator comes into play, if not during these scenes as much as they do later upon reflection of the events.
While Drood himself is said to have Egyptian heritage, and the catacombs of the Underworld of London are marked with Egyptian hieroglyphics, I couldn help but feel a bit of a Lovecraft flavor as well. The Lovecraftian elements are not blatant, but the talk of ancient gods to whom Drood is loyal bears some parallels to much of the Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos. This is probably more from Lovecraft drawing inspiration from Egyptian mythology than anything else.
In many ways, Drood is also a novel for bibliophiles and (obviously) lovers of Victorian literature and culture. Throughout the novel, many allusions are made to past works of Dickens, the inspiration for characters in his novels as well as the characters, plots and genesis of much of Collins fiction. Drood has encouraged me to dip my toes into both Dickens fiction and Collins fiction
So in the end, what is Drood about? Many things ?the power of creativity, imagination, the haunting specter of death, jealousy, addiction, the written word, story, delusion, artistry, and many more things. What Dan Simmons has done in Drood is nothing short of breathtaking and captivating, in evoking such a genuine feel for these people and the world in which they inhabit, but by also creating a narrator/character who is both something of a prick, but also a vastly compelling storyteller. I can recommend this staggering and immersive novel highly enough.
?2009 Rob H. Bedford

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever .
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in The Terror , Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.

The fate of Sir John Franklin's last expedition remains one of the great mysteries of Arctic exploration. What we know, more or less, is this: In the balmy days of May 1845, 129 officers and men aboard two ships -- Erebus and Terror -- departed from England for the Canadian Arctic in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. They were never heard from again. Between 1847 and 1859, Franklin's wife pushed for and funded various relief missions, even as the expectation of finding survivors was replaced by the slim hope for answers.
It's a story perfectly suited for fiction, if only because we have so little else to go on. Dan Simmons's new novel, The Terror, dives headlong into the frozen waters of the Franklin mystery, mixing historical adventure with gothic horror -- a sort of Patrick O'Brian meets Edgar Allan Poe against the backdrop of a J.M.W. Turner icescape. Meticulously researched and brilliantly imagined, The Terror won't satisfy historians or even Franklin buffs, but as a literary hybrid, the novel presents a dramatic and mythic argument for how and why Franklin and his men met their demise.
The book opens well into the middle of things, at the onset of the ships' third winter beset in sea ice. Months after Franklin's own death, his second-in-command is now in charge. Gothic imagery pervades, as "Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts." This "attack" turns out to be an artful description of the aurora borealis, though Simmons never tells us that directly. Indeed, the power of his metaphoric language comes from the archetypal superstitions of the crew, who, despite their anchor of Protestant Christianity, are a pagan lot deep down.
But the crew's belief in witches and magic may or may not explain their main fear: a "Thing on the ice" that stalks, beheads, eviscerates and otherwise kills off crewmen one by one. For 200 pages or so, we aren't sure if this beast is a figment of their overactive imaginations, maybe a giant polar bear or a yeti of Northern lore, a monster suggesting the "beastie" of Golding's Lord of the Flies -- the terror within -- or Beowulf's Grendel, not to say Grendel's mother -- a preternatural, evil intelligence bent on destruction.
Faced with mutinous threats, general starvation, intense cold and something wrong with their tinned food supply (scurvy and lead poisoning appear rampant), Crozier provides leadership without arrogance. As the novel's protagonist, he is a man of the people, a realist, unlucky in love. As an Irishman in the British Royal Navy, he has been largely ignored by the Admiralty despite his stoic competence.
By contrast, Franklin represents most of what was wrong in early British Arctic exploration. His prior expeditions had met with minimal success, making him best known in England as "the man who ate his shoes," though given all the other things men ate to stay alive on Arctic expeditions, it's unclear why shoe leather would be singled out for ignominy. Goaded by his very public failings, Franklin retained his penchant for arrogant idealism and wasteful ritual. He brought along fine china and monogrammed silverware, among other "necessities." In the end, his primary mistake is cultural: Out of xenophobia he refuses to adopt local methods of travel, shelter and hunting. Yet to say that Sir John gets his just deserts is unfair if only because 128 others suffer the same fate.
Crozier recognizes the captain's weaknesses, and therein lies the novel's poignant sense of loss. He dispenses shipboard justice out of practical necessity rather than lofty idealism. In their desperate hours, he preaches not from the Bible favored by Franklin but from the "Book of Leviathan" -- his own recitations from Thomas Hobbes, which, among other things, explains the birth of superstition and religion: "There was nothing which a Poet could introduce as a person in his Poem, which [man] did not make into either a God or a Divel." As the novel descends toward its hellish climax, the "Divel" chasing our crew -- that "Thing on the ice" -- transcends its monstrous nature and becomes the manifestation of earthly retribution, wild payback for the hubris of Western civilization.
The vehicle of that transcendence is Lady Silence, a mute Inuit girl who lives on the ship and goes at her own whim, providing a portal to Eskimo mythology and shamanism. Northern spiritual philosophy gives the world -- and this novel -- its ultimate balance, predicting the coming of kabloona ("pale people"), whose arrival brings "drunkenness and despair," melts the sea ice, kills off the white bear and calls forth the "End of Times." While Franklin's men are unable to escape the realities of starvation, brutal cold and the violent urge, Crozier's instinct for survival pushes the novel to its ethereal end.
This mix of historical realism, gothic horror and ancient mythology is a difficult walk on fractured ice, and anyone without Simmons's mastery of narrative craft would have undoubtedly fallen through. Despite its Leviathan length, The Terror proves a compelling read, while making the average meal consumed by the average American seem a precious gift from warm-weather gods.

Think you know true fear? You don't.Think you've read the most chilling book? Not even close.Think you can't be shocked? Good luck!Maybe you're ready for the most truly frightening reading experience of your life, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel that's been terrifying readers for over a decade.Song of Kali.

The magnificent conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction sagas of our time The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her startling message to her growing army of disciples. But first they must embark on a final spectacular mission to discover the underlying meaning of the universe itself. They have been followed on their journey by the mysterious Shrike--monster, angel, killing machine--who is about to reveal the long-held secret of its origin and purpose. And on the planet of Hyperion, where the story first began, the final revelation will be delivered--an apocalyptic message that unlocks the secrets of existence and the fate of humankind in the galaxy.

The winner of a 1990 Hugo Award follows seven pilgrims on a voyage to the world of Hyperion--dominated by the all-powerful creature, the Shrike--where they hope to learn the secret that will save humanity. Reissue.

The multiple-award-winning science fiction master returns to the universe that is his greatest triumph--the world of "Hyperion" and "The Fall ofHyperion" --with a novel even more magnificent than its predecessors. Dan Simmons's "Hyperion" was an immediate sensation on its first publication in 1989. This staggering multifaceted tale of the far future heralded the conquest of the science fiction field by a man who had already won the World Fantasy Award for his first novel ("Song of Kali") and had also published one of the most well-received horror novels in the field, "Carrion Comfort." "Hyperion" went on to win the Hugo Award as Best Novel, and it and its companion volume, "The Fall of Hyperion," took their rightful places in the science fiction pantheon of new classics. Now, six years later, Simmons returns to this richly imagined world of technological achievement, excitement, wonder and fear. "Endymion" is a story about love and memory, triumph and terror--an instant candidate for the field's highest honors.