The Terror, my last Dan Simmons for a few months, is just that. As much as I loved his previous work in epic science fiction, this suffered more from bad writing than the Hyperion and Ilium sagas combined. At a whopping 955 pages, it’s certainly a lot to work with. The narrative is a 10 character exploit of jumbled chronology, all in the form of a diary or a log. Terror is a remarkably well researched historic novel disguised as a bone chilling horror. Well, it’s not. At no time is the book horror, while it has its moments of scares and thrills, scattered throughout hundreds of pages.
As it was advertised, I was expecting something in the vein of Carpenter’s Thing, a snowbound horror to scare the crap out of you, but what I got was a modern Moby Dick. Simmons recreates with astounding detail everything that could have happened on that dread expedition, you actually almost end up getting frostbite from the cold while standing guard alongside Lieutenant Little. While it is a beautiful about the doomed polar expedition led by Sir John Franklin, which set out from England in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage — the long-dreamed-of Arctic shipping lane connecting the earth’s two great oceans — and never returned - this is not what I signed up for. After 600+ pages I was still waiting for the supernatural horror to take the lead, instead of the mundane horror of living on a frozen ship stranded in the Arctic in the early years of Dickens.
Knowing how much Simmons has to offer us, The Teror was a bit of a let down being so firmly established in reality. To understand his talent I have to confess I haven’t finished Moby Dick, White Jacket or Redburn, but, with great effort, I finished this beast of a book. While not as riveting, thrilling, entertaining or creative as his other efforts, it still manages to hook you into the world, even if you hate the sea and don’t really care about non-fiction. Despite the urgent need for a editor to cut half or at least a third of the book, Terror delivers as a richly textured thriller.
FYI: On the count of 3500+ pages of Dan Simmons since March 1st, I’ll be reading two light fixtures – Haita (The Pack) and Krucifix from Serge Brussolo - before moving on to G.R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.
BTW: Already sold The Terror (bills to pay).
PS: March headcount: 43 books / 325ron. Not bad at all.