DroodBy Dan Simmons
Little, Brown, 2009

No doubt I’m not the only reader who was surprised by Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel The Terror. I’d considered Simmons a talented writer before that – Hyperion is on many a ‘best sci-fi novel’ list, and Illium and Olympos together constitute a Homer-pastiche of mighty proportions – but nothing he’d written prepared me for the heft, the atmosphere, and the sheer literary confidence of The Terror, his fictionalized account of the Victorian era’s doomed arctic mission under Captain Franklin. A book like that changes the way you think of an author, and it can make you dread his next book – surely it must inevitably disappoint?

Drood, Simmons’ new book, doesn’t disappoint. It too is set in the Victorian era (at one point the Franklin mission is even discussed – by Queen Victoria, no less), and it’s a huge, sprawling gothic adventure yarn starring a driven Charles Dickens, narrated by his peevish rival Wilkie Collins, and featuring a malevolent version of Edwin Drood. Simmons’ vivid narrative takes readers from glittering palaces of imperial splendor to hopeless squalor beneath the streets of London, and once again the bravura force and panache of it all is at times breathtaking.

There are everyday horrors aplenty here – a stroke victim is described in pitiless detail, opium dens abound, the grinding poverty of the London slums is unflinchingly evoked, and there’s a deliciously shiver-inducing scene with a sleep-walker – and as in The Terror, Simmons also introduces elements of the supernatural (including a brain-burrowing scarab that will have insectophobes twitching in revulsion). But at heart this is a story of envy: the corrosive envy Drood feels for all of society, and, more intimately, the biting envy Wilkie Collins feels for his far more talented fellow writer. The dinner scene in which Dickens savages The Moonstone is surely the stuff of every writer’s nightmares:

“I found the finished book extremely tiresome,” Dickens said softly.
For a moment, I could only hold my glass in both hands and stare at the older man. “I beg your pardon?” I said at last.
“You heard me, sir. I find The Moonstone tiresome in the extreme. Its construction is awkward beyond endurance, there is a vein of obstinate conceit that runs throughout the entire tale and makes enemies of readers.”

Among its many and varied satisfactions, Drood has one more subtle than the rest: it proves that The Terror was no fluke. This is a new Dan Simmons, writing the best books of his life. His next one is awaited now with almost a wonder of anticipation.

–Steve Donoghue