Drood: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "My name is Wilkie Collins, and my guess, since I plan to delay the publication of this document for at least a century and a..." (more)
Key Phrases: wild boys, cheap jack, blacking factory, Charles Dickens, Inspector Field, Gad's Hill (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Bestseller Simmons (The Terror) brilliantly imagines a terrifying sequence of events as the inspiration for Dickens's last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in this unsettling and complex thriller. In the course of narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck and trying to rescue fellow passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin. Along with his real-life novelist friend Wilkie Collins, who narrates the tale, Dickens pursues the elusive Drood, an effort that leads the pair to a nightmarish world beneath London's streets. Collins begins to wonder whether the object of their quest, if indeed the man exists, is merely a cover for his colleague's own murderous inclinations. Despite the book's length, readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles, which will remind many of the work of Charles Palliser and Michael Cox. 4-city author tour. (Feb.)
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From The New Yorker

In this creepy intertextual tale of professional jealousy and possible madness, Wilkie Collins tells of his friendship and rivalry with Charles Dickens, and of the mysterious phantasm named Edwin Drood, who pursues them both. Drood, cadaverous and pale, first appears at the scene of a railway accident in which Dickens was one of the few survivors; later, Dickens and Collins descend into London�s sewer in search of his lair. Meanwhile, a retired police detective warns Collins that Drood is responsible for more than three hundred murders, and that he will destroy Dickens in his quest for immortality. Collins is peevish, vain, and cruel, and the most unreliable of narrators: an opium addict, prone to nightmarish visions. The narrative is overlong, with discarded subplots and red herrings, but Simmons, a master of otherworldly suspense, cleverly explores envy�s corrosive effects.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 784 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (February 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316007021
• ISBN-13: 978-0316007023
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (130 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,863 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

158 of 181 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't Judge This Book By Its Jacket, March 4, 2009

By	Bornintime (The East Coast) - See all my reviews

I have been a fan of Dan Simmons work for over 20 years and this is the 25th book that I have read by him. I almost always enjoy his work. That being said I have never been so surprised by all the 5-star reviews for a book as I am with this one. If you read the jacket blurb on Dan Simmons' latest novel you would think that this book was about a mysterious underworld character named Drood, who Charles Dickens obsessed over in the last 5 years of his life. Or you may think that the book is centered on Dickens himself. Both of these sound interesting but unfortunately this book is about neither. It is about, and narrated by, one Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens' friend, collaborator and competitor. This is more of a personal diary than an actual story. When you read this you will want Wilkie to get to the point on Dickens and Drood but what you will get get for most of the book is Wilkie's ramblings about every aspect of his personal life. You will get detailed self-absorbed descriptions about his writing, his 2 relationships with women, his theater work, his dining habits, his relationship with his mother, his appearance, which one of his various places he will sleep on a given night, his increasing dependence on opium, and lengthy descriptions of his domestic situations. Over 771 pages he will spare you no detail. Simmons is a good writer so some of these are interesting or humorous but nowhere close to entertain us over almost 800 pages. Yes, there is a story in here about Dickens and Drood (sort of) but maybe this covers one third of the book. To say that half or more of this book should have been lopped off by a good editor is in no way an exaggeration. But what is truly amazing is that if one manages to wade through all the minutiae of Wilkie Collins' life to get to the meat of the Dickens/Drood story there is an additional caveat - as the story goes on Wilkie is more and more impaired by opium so you can't rely on everything his says being true! Did this event actually happen? Did Wilkie imagine it? Have a hallucination? Often we never find out and you realize that most of this book is pointless. (Now I suspect that the author's response to my criticism would probably point out that this is the point of the book - the jealousy, arrogance and weakness of Collins compared to the great Dickens. That may be so but I personally can't take this in such a large dose, and more importantly no one could possibly get a clue from the marketing of this book that this is in fact what it is about!) I will admit to greatly enjoying the last 50 pages of this book as Wilkie's character is exposed even further; It is just a shame that it took such a long and sometimes tedious path to get there.

86 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deliciously creepy, January 31, 2009

By	K. Huff (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

At nearly 800 pages, Drood is literally a doorstopper of a book. Set in 1865 through 1870, the story centers around Charles Dickens, beginning with his train accident at Staplehurst on the ninth of June. On that very day, as Dickens rushes to assist the dead and dying, he meets a mysterious, and quite creepy, man named Drood. Dickens's story is narrated by Wilkie Collins, both friend and competitor, as Drood plays a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the two authors, in the dangerous underbelly of London.

I had a really, really hard time putting this book down. It's just my kind of novel: lots of adventure, lots of tension. The narrator has a tendency to wander a bit, going off on tangents when he should be following the story, but I didn't see the extra information (and there's a lot of it thrown in) as detracting from it. Rather, I liked all the biographical notes on both Dickens and Collins, and I liked the interactions they had with one another, and the creative give-and-take of information that lead to novels like The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Although Collins talks mostly about Dickens (sometimes with jealousy) and his demons, Collins finds that he has a few demons of his own to vanquish.

The biggest problem I had with this book was the ending. Honestly, I felt a bit cheated: the ending of the book was very anticlimactic, disappointing after all that wonderful buildup. And there are some parts of Chapter 25 that sound as though Simmons ripped them right from the movie The Mummy.

But for the most part, I enjoyed this novel. It contained great characters (though both Dickens and Collins could be infuriating at times), and great suspense.

42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simmons' best., January 30, 2009

By	Ellison - See all my reviews

A delightful book, made so by the voice of the narrator, Wilkie Collins. I will leave the details of the plot and it's historical basis to other reviewers. The humor, surprise, and dread of which this book is brimming all come from Dan Simmons' creation of the drug addicted, envious, murdering, completely self absorbed Collins. Simmons has worked the same magic that Nabakov (I am not comparing their stature as writers) did in Lolita, taking despicable feelings and acts and by inverting them make them entertaining.
To me he carries it off flawlessly, keeping a steady forceful momentum from beginning to end.