The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

Simmons' work is such a Frankenstein's monster of different genres and sub-genres, modes, and styles, and he's so deft at blending the disparate appendages that the transitions between each never come close to feeling jarring or contrived.

The Terror is equal parts historical fiction and horror, with a healthy dash of Inuit mythology thrown in for good measure. The framework and foundation of The Terror is of a naval historical fiction surrounding the doomed Franklin Expedition tasked with the discovery of the Northwest passage in the mid-1840s, but I suspect Simmons' true desires were to plumb the various subgenres of horror that he blends within this larger framework. Nearly every popular subgenre of horror is present; there's the much-touted monster aspect of the story, but there also exists elements of pulpier slasher fiction in the later pages. My personal favorite — and perhaps the most disturbing of the lot, because it's true — are the descriptions of men suffering from severe bouts of scurvy. These passages are true body horror. I found myself recoiling is disgust and visceral offense while reading through them, physically cringing all the more because they weren't merely figments of Simmons' healthy (and somewhat disturbed?) imagination but real symptoms suffered by real men. Awful stuff.

Simmons is a master of pacing. At nearly 800 pages, The Terror is not a short book — and it doesn't have a vast, epic scope to help keeps things fresh and shepherd the reader through that pagecount. Simmons instead resorts to regularly changing the third person limited viewpoint characters and jumping back and forth through time. The changes in mode and voice greatly help to keep things from going stale, and the narrative blends smoothly between the different characters. The Terror never falls victim to the slog that drags other works of this nature down. It's masterful work, and its quality is telling in that it kept me burning through pages and pages of relatively minor activity set mostly all within the same ship, frozen in the same ice, over hundreds of pages of narrative.

It helps that his characters are so authentic and that their voices are all so unique. Simmons' agency in crafting the characters out of real, historical men is notable. There's a strong sense of poignancy reading through this story and knowing that the expedition is doomed to fail, because you grow to like some of these characters and to preemptively mourn their inevitable deaths. Bridgens' quiet, wise manner; Irving's youthful, hopeful naivete; Crozier's curmudgeonly manner and focus on duty. I found the main villain of the crew to be extremely compelling, as well, and the subtle way in which his evil is portrayed in the first half of the book leaves the pieces of the puzzle to the reader to put together, and colors the entire middle portion of the book with an air of negative foreshadowing. Voice is a strength, especially in the later chapters when characters' wits and mental stability begin to fail them. Simmons is a master craftsman and I'll remember certain chapters late in this book for the rest of my life due to how unique and affecting they remain to me.

I'm not sure quite what I expected when I picked this up, but it certainly wasn't what I got. I've read Simmons before — I greatly enjoyed Hyperion — and I'm beginning to think of him as one of the best modern writers I've experienced. I used to think of him as a science fiction writer, but the amount of research he's put into crafting The Terror is equal to any great writer of historical fiction I've ever read. But the real strength of this book is how Simmons colors it with his abject weirdness. The soul of horror is growing tension and creating the fear of what's to come, and Simmons is such a freaking oddball that you're never quite sure what he's going to pull out of his bag of tricks next.

In this way Simmons reminds of Stephen King. Except without the cocaine. And, you know... Actually good.

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