The Terror, by Dan Simmons

I checked out Dan Simmons' The Terror from the library as an audio book. I had my hopes set on a story of intrigue and courage, with more than a splash of horror and the macabre. The cover to the book is beautiful and does so much for the imagination, and I confess that this was what initially attracted me to the book a few months ago.

The reader was British, which I thought was fitting for the setting of the novel. The Terror is based very loosely on Captain John Franklin's doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror into the Arctic. Technically, the book is classified as historical fiction with a tinge of fantasy/horror. The ships are searching for the Northwest Passage. While out at sea, their ships freeze up in the ice for an unusually long winter. No one is ever seen alive again. This ends the historicity of the book. Everything else is creative freedom. Soon superstitions are running wild on board the two ships. To add to their fear, some sort of monster always lurks out in the ice and snow.

Each chapter alternates between the present (1848) and the past, varying with different characters and giving some background to them. I suppose the reason for this is to build character, but I did not care much for this style.

It is the style that is the biggest problem with the book. Simmons dives in to a pit of historical research and bombards the reader with agonizing descriptions and details. Because of this, there doesn't seem to be much of anything happening, and the reader struggles to understand a time scheme. Thus, progress is painfully slow.

I was eager to hear about the struggles the crew faced, how they fought with scurvy and malnutrition. How they faced the brutal, freezing deathlands of the Arctic. Heck, I was even interested in the monster. Instead I felt that I was given brief samples of the struggles and an overwhelming amount of useless banter.

The Terror is the first book that I've put down in a long time. I made it over a third of the way through and didn't feel like there was any weight to it. Maybe the last two-thirds were great, but I just couldn't bring myself to go on anymore. I was minutely interested at the most, and so I decided to abandon the read. I'm not sure what became of the crew, but I'll wager that they sank into madness and turned on each other. Perhaps one day I'll grab an actual book and read it myself, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.