In all the commotion of the holiday season, I believe I neglected to mention that it's been a whole year since my first review went up on Choate. And since all occasions should be marked, I would like to point out that the very first book I reviewed, Dylan Morgan's Hosts, is now out in a handsome paperback format, made handy and portable for those of us without e-readers. I recommend you go and purchase it, in support of worthy horrific writing everywhere.

But before you do, I have another of Dan Simmons's loquacious historical horror novels to discuss. This is a hard book to describe. I'm of two minds about it, and I feel that anything I say should be preemptively slapped with a Your Mileage May Vary disclaimer.

Let's start with the plot, because that's a nice, straightforward place to start a review. Drood is about the last years of Charles Dickens's life, as told by colleague and collaborator William Wilkie Collins. Only it's not, because this is really more Collins's story than anything else, a recounting of his complicated love life and the trials of publishing and how hard it is to exist in the shadow of the great Charles Dickens. Only, that's not what it's about, either-- really, it all has to do with Drood, a mysterious figure in an opera cape and top hat that Dickens encounters at the site of a horrible train crash. Drood has no eyelids, is a master of hypnosis, inhabits London's underground, and may be responsible for some three hundred murders, either directly or through his cult of loyal followers.

All right, so it's not that straightforward.

Actually, you could consider Drood to be about London in the late 1800s, because, like with The Terror, Dan Simmons has done his research. Instead of ships and scurvy, this time we have the sewer systems and catacombs of London, the process of adapting novels to the stage, opium use, and the art of mesmerism, to name a few. The information is not exactly superfluous—it does all relate back to the plot, though occasionally tangentially.

It’s hard to discuss this without giving too much away, but suffice to say that much of the story hinges on figuring out what is real and what is not, what is fact and what is merely myth. It gets to the point that the emphasis on realism is at odds with the actual story. The reader knows almost straight off that there is something amiss with this Drood business. In a world so logical and grounded in historical fact, it’s almost a given. In an attempt to avoid spoiling anything for anyone, I’ll just say that the reader will not be surprised to find that these suspicions are well founded.

Collins himself is a shifty and unreliable narrator. He’s also a fascinating character, with a unique voice that is both engaging and sometimes frustratingly self-absorbed. I don’t know how well Simmons’s version of Collins parallels the real author, but if it’s accurate, Collins may have been one of those people who makes a better fictional character than real life dinner guest.

The best moments of Drood are, in my opinion, ones that stand off by themselves with little connection to the main plot. Simmons proves he can still do truly surreal stuff when he puts his mind to it. At one point in the story, Collins moves into a house in which something— an unknown, horrible something—inhabits the servants’ stairway. It’s an isolated incident that remains very much unexplained. It says something that Drood, with his exhaustively described back story and all his center stage posturing, never manages to be quite so terrifying.

REVIEW BY ALLISON BOHAC