Guest Review: The Terror by Dan Simmons

Part of the A-Zed Historical Fiction Review project
T is for Terror, The
Guest review by John W. Oliver, Writer.

This Book Is About

Guest Reviewer John W. Oliver’s Thoughts On This Book

If only Captain John Franklin and Francis Crozier had sailed the Erebus and Terror through the Arctic Sea today. They would have found the passage a lot easier than they did in their day. These two ships had once sailed across the Ross Sea in the Antarctic a number of times, and Mount Terror on Ross Island is named for the namesake of the novel. However, in their last mission seeking the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Sea, both ships and crews were lost.

Mr. Simmons does them the honor of recounting their tale.

He does not stop with a simple nautical narrative though. The crews of the two ships are stranded in the ice, running out of food & water and slowly dying of scurvy & botulism. The pressure of these conditions press on the minds and morale of the crew. Not to mention the thing out on the ice that is hunting them, taking them down one by one. Many believe it to be a great white bear. Others think it might be something else. These facets of the novel transform it into a story of supernatural horror like nothing else you’ll find on the mass market rack.

One of the things I admire about this story is research. Mr. Simmons took the opportunity to find out as much as he could about the Franklin Expedition, and he took the facts he found and fed it into his novel. Once he knew where the camps were established, bodies buried and ships sank, he wove the story between these facts, giving us what might have been for over two years out on the ice. A number of his sources are cited in the back of the book if the reader wants to follow up the story with a more scholarly exploration of the events.

The only difficultly about the book is the language. Since it is set in the 19th-century, Mr. Simmons writes the first hundred pages or so in that style. For us in the 21st-century, this style is difficult to consume. He did this to establish the tone of the period, and he eases up on the style later in the novel. But still, the book is big, and the nature of the writing gives it more heft.

This was my first Dan Simmons novel, and after finishing it, I have to say I’ve been missing out on something great. I really like the historical horror story he pursued here, and I am also intrigued by his subsequent books, Drood and Black Hills. And the man has not limited himself to just historical horror. He has stepped foot into science fiction and more mainstream horror as well. I can’t wait to see where his next project is going to lead him.