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Dan Simmons's The Terror is an astonishingly good book. It's vicious and brutal and bleak, very hard to read sometimes — but only hard to read because the characters are so vivid and human that you don't want anything bad to happen to them. (To most of them.)
It's a supernatural take on the ill-fated John Franklin expedition, which set out from England in the 1840s to discover the Northwest Passage, then blundered into an iron-hard winter that locked both ships into the ice. Simmons weaves the real-word clues together into a frosty lacework that offers an exhaustively researched and tidy solution — albeit a fantastical one — to the 150-year-old mystery. It's a good book to read in the pit of winter, provided you've got warm blankets tucked around your shoulders and a hot mug of cocoa within easy reach. (If you're out camping in the snow, it might be a bit much to take.)
There's a bit of a bog in the middle stretch, when the story threatens to dissolve into a string of repetitively, but creatively, horrific acts. But Simmons pulls it out, and for the last couple of hundred pages my fingers might have been frozen to the book. Thrilling and detail-rich and overwhelming and affecting — read it!
It's a supernatural take on the ill-fated John Franklin expedition, which set out from England in the 1840s to discover the Northwest Passage, then blundered into an iron-hard winter that locked both ships into the ice. Simmons weaves the real-word clues together into a frosty lacework that offers an exhaustively researched and tidy solution — albeit a fantastical one — to the 150-year-old mystery. It's a good book to read in the pit of winter, provided you've got warm blankets tucked around your shoulders and a hot mug of cocoa within easy reach. (If you're out camping in the snow, it might be a bit much to take.)
There's a bit of a bog in the middle stretch, when the story threatens to dissolve into a string of repetitively, but creatively, horrific acts. But Simmons pulls it out, and for the last couple of hundred pages my fingers might have been frozen to the book. Thrilling and detail-rich and overwhelming and affecting — read it!
