The Terror: A Novel (Paperback)

by Dan Simmons (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hugo-winner Simmons (Olympos) brings the horrific trials and tribulations of arctic exploration vividly to life in this beautifully written historical, which injects a note of supernatural horror into the 1840s Franklin expedition and its doomed search for the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin, the leader of the expedition and captain of the Erebus, is an aging fool. Francis Crozier, his second in command and captain of the Terror, is a competent sailor, but embittered after years of seeing lesser men with better connections given preferment over him. With their two ships quickly trapped in pack ice, their voyage is a disaster from start to finish. Some men perish from disease, others from the cold, still others from botulism traced to tinned food purchased from the lowest bidder. Madness, mutiny and cannibalism follow. And then there's the monstrous creature from the ice, the thing like a polar bear but many times larger, possessed of a dark and vicious intelligence. This complex tale should find many devoted readers and add significantly to Simmons's already considerable reputation. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by David Masiel

The fate of Sir John Franklin's last expedition remains one of the great mysteries of Arctic exploration. What we know, more or less, is this: In the balmy days of May 1845, 129 officers and men aboard two ships -- Erebus and Terror -- departed from England for the Canadian Arctic in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. They were never heard from again. Between 1847 and 1859, Franklin's wife pushed for and funded various relief missions, even as the expectation of finding survivors was replaced by the slim hope for answers.

It's a story perfectly suited for fiction, if only because we have so little else to go on. Dan Simmons's new novel, The Terror, dives headlong into the frozen waters of the Franklin mystery, mixing historical adventure with gothic horror -- a sort of Patrick O'Brian meets Edgar Allan Poe against the backdrop of a J.M.W. Turner icescape. Meticulously researched and brilliantly imagined, The Terror won't satisfy historians or even Franklin buffs, but as a literary hybrid, the novel presents a dramatic and mythic argument for how and why Franklin and his men met their demise.

The book opens well into the middle of things, at the onset of the ships' third winter beset in sea ice. Months after Franklin's own death, his second-in-command is now in charge. Gothic imagery pervades, as "Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts." This "attack" turns out to be an artful description of the aurora borealis, though Simmons never tells us that directly. Indeed, the power of his metaphoric language comes from the archetypal superstitions of the crew, who, despite their anchor of Protestant Christianity, are a pagan lot deep down.

But the crew's belief in witches and magic may or may not explain their main fear: a "Thing on the ice" that stalks, beheads, eviscerates and otherwise kills off crewmen one by one. For 200 pages or so, we aren't sure if this beast is a figment of their overactive imaginations, maybe a giant polar bear or a yeti of Northern lore, a monster suggesting the "beastie" of Golding's Lord of the Flies -- the terror within -- or Beowulf's Grendel, not to say Grendel's mother -- a preternatural, evil intelligence bent on destruction.

Faced with mutinous threats, general