The Terror: Dan Simmons

"Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?" -- Dr. Harry D.S. Goodsir, assistant surgeon, HMS Erebus

May 19th, 1945: Two ships of the Royal Navy, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, depart from England to find the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic Circle. Commanded by Sir John Franklin, both ships are enhanced with steam engines and reinforced with iron to allow them to plow through the ice they will encounter. Equipped with enough canned goods to sustain the one hundred and twenty-nine men for three years, the expedition is expected to go quickly and return safely and win Sir John the honor denied him after his failed overland expedition to find the Northwest Passage some two decades earlier.

Come winter, however, the two ships find themselves frozen in the unforgiving Arctic Sea, more than half their rations poisoned by botulism and lead, the men growing mutinous, and the crews of both ships stalked by a seemingly invulnerable white beast of enormous size and almost human cunning. As the crew members die, supplies run low and the elements begin threatening the integrity of the ships, the survivors are faced with a decision: remain aboard ships which may be too compromised to sail when - if - the ice thaws in the summer, or take to land in a desperate attempt to find food, shelter and rescue.

Brilliant. There is no other way to describe this book. Dan Simmons takes a factual historic event and envisions what could have occurred to the two vessels over the three-year period they were entrapped in the Arctic ice. Well-crafted characters, a narrative that switches point of view between several main characters and a timeline that bounces back and forth between different periods of the expedition keep the story interesting, unpredictable and incredibly well-paced. The sequences where the beast attacks are varied between bursts of sporadic violence, mockery of the crew with gruesome displays of the uneaten and an absolutely thrilling chase through the ice-encrusted rigging of the ship
which runs twenty pages but never gets boring. If more authors had the dedication to so thoroughly research a real-life event and flesh it out with their own details and theories, the horror genre as a whole would not be such a stagnant, unremarkable wasteland.

So then, why isn't this a five-star review? There's a couple reasons. First, the subject matter. I understand it's three years on ships frozen in the Arctic and there's not going to be a whole hell of a lot going on when the beast isn't chewing on somebody's head; however, this does not necessitate the redundancy of environmental descriptions. There's only so much scenery to describe and after reading the description for the thirteenth or fourteenth time, you become far too familiar with the monotony these sailors must have been feeling. Also, I don't need a recap of who's alive and dead, by name and rank, more than once in my novels.

Secondly, the ending. It wasn't a bad way to end things, truth be told. As a matter of fact, it wrapped up all the loose threads set up in the first 700 pages rather nicely. It's just that the nihilistic air the book takes a turn toward had me expecting something a little more brutal. Again, not bad but not quite what I was expecting.

Pick this puppy up, read it and then take a little time and research the actual Franklin expedition. Or vice versa. Just be sure you do not do yourself the disservice of leaving The Terror unread.

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Paperback: 784 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books; Paperback edition (December 10, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0316017450
ISBN-13: 978-0316017459
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