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Book Review: The Terror May 22, 2009
This novel by Dan Simmons about Sir John Franklen's doomed expedition to the Artic is kind of hard to describe. I guess "historical horror" would come closest.
Most of the book is a straight up (though surely dramatized) retelling of how the crews of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus get stuck in the ice while trying to search for a shortcut to the Orient through the Arctic circle. You've got all the threats you might expect: the freezing cold, starvation, disease, mutiny, cannibalism, and the like. And Simmons does a pretty good job at making this all exciting in a classic adventure story kind of way. This is true even though the most cursory history lesson on the subject tells us that the expedition (which was quite real) had no known survivors. Two ships trapped in the ice of the Arctic and isolated from rescue by miles and years is a heck of a setup.
But apparently Simmons didn't think that was quite enough, since the rest of the plot involves the men's being stalked by some kind of supernatural killing machine on the ice. It's a giant bear spirit monster ...thing. So between scenes you might expect to see on a Discovery Channel special you get "gotcha" moments like those out of a horror movie book where the creature will pop up out of nowhere and bite someone's face off.
On balance it was a pretty good book, if a bit long. The setting is cool (har har), novel (har har again) and interesting enough to keep my attention long enough, and Simmons does a great job of making many of the characters --every one of which is based on a real member of the expedition-- deep and detailed so that the human drama shows through. Would the book have been sufficient (or even better) without the whole supernatural terror angle? Hard to say, but I think it could have been.
What I will say for sure is that the book falls flat on its face for a good long stretch towards the end when Simmons resorts to a stilted and lame literary technique for exposition, presumably because he didn't want to leave a few mysteries totally unsolved. But his solution breaks so much from the style of the rest of the novel that it leaves you going "Huh? WTF?"
Still, on balance it's a pretty good book just for the quasi-historical stuff.
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Tags: Book Review, Dan Simmons, Horror, The Terror
