Dan Simmons

A Novel

The Terror

Amulya Garimella

took a star off for platypus pond and weird sexualization of every single female character (mostly platypus pond though). incredibly written otherwise and made me feel cold. very intense moments of action and, well, terror. hickey is pretty one-dimensional but the one-dimensionality is excusable (view spoiler)[when allowing for the effects of scurvy (hide spoiler)]. would have been 5 stars with (view spoiler)[Silna (hide spoiler)] pov chapters, (view spoiler)[which would have much better justified the ending (hide spoiler)]. worth reading for Goodsir alone, everyone else is cool too i guess.

Wynter

This is historical fiction first, with the horror plot line coming in second. You will learn about the Franklin expedition before getting spooked. I think if it was purely a horror story, it would end up pulpy and cheap. But with the meaty historical backbone and real human struggles Simmons takes The Terror to the whole new level.

Gavin

Casts an atmosphere of desperation and doom from the very first pages and rarely lets it up except to ironically foreshadow renewed dread or to show off the sheer manful stoicism of his men.
Rats, as Crozier knows from the sad experience of thirteen winters in the ice, tend to eat one’s friends quietly and efficiently, except for their frequent screeching as the blood-maddened and ravenous vermin turn on one another

In this cold, teeth can shatter after two or three hours — actually explode — sending shrapnel of bone and enamel flying inside the cavern of one’s clenched jaws. Sometimes, Crozier knows from experience, you can hear the enamel cracking just before the teeth explode. 

“I explained to Sir James over tea,” Jane was saying, “that my darling Sir John’s credit and reputation are infinitely dearer to me than any selfish enjoyment of my husband’s society, even if he must be gone for four years”

One of Crozier’s legs was knocked aside and down as the bullet tore through the knee or the muscle just below the knee. The captain made no sound.

Naval culture is one of the most extreme and alien cultures, particularly among those which persisted way under 200 years ago. This book gives you the misery and extremity, but you need Patrick O’Brian for the glory and humour. Why were men proud to go on the ice ships for 4 years with a long line of lethal failures to follow.

Overall a triumph of style and stamina but I don’t actually admire literary stamina.

Kate Hall

Atmospheric and downright unsettling at times - glorious mix of history and horror! Definitely a bit ponderous at times and could have done with a harsher edit - I caught myself skim reading at times.

That said, I came from watching the TV show to reading the book and...the show was superior. Yes I said it. The changes made were definitely for the better.

I also had to grit my teeth through the treatment women. D.Simms clearly comes from the “breasted boobily” school of writing - nearly every single female character mentioned has her breasts (or pubic hair) described. They “bobble”, apparently. And the less said about Crozier’s “romances” the better, ugh.

Joey Baker

Back alley Knee-Wobbler 

I was hesitant to start this as I tend to hate Victorian era British stuff, and its daunting length. But oh boy is this shit pure COMFY. 

I had trouble picturing the monster in my mind, being so poisoned with terrible CGI effects all I could summon was some unnatural video game looking bear. I looked up how it's depicted in the show, and it seemed to do even a worse job than my brain. They just put a human face on a bear. It's supposed to be a triangular head!
But I now I look forward to watching the show very much. 

lol at Crozier being in his 40s and just starting to suspect that girls might also bust when they fug.

The shut-in totals, we have:

  

   
   8 breasts  
  3 sex scenes  
  several confused erections  
  1 genital mutilation  
  good sodomites vs evil sodomites  
  1 interrupted bum buggery on the orlop deck  
  1 tongue chewin' spirit bear  
  1 pulverized ribcage  
  8 people munched  
  SCURVY  
 
  


4 stars
Joe-Jo says: check it out.

It was 'n long read but definitely one of the best books I've read. It makes you wonder did this really happen and if so who lived to tell the story? Did the man survive? 

Caroline 

Ewan

** spoiler alert **
            A great book, buried in a not-so-great book.

So, as you probably know (as you are reading a review that may contain spoilers....oh...this may contain spoilers) this is a spliced up historical fiction cum monster romp. A sort of English Passengers meets The Thing (in fact, most of the imagery in my head was pretty much "Thingy").

Using the failed Erebus/Terror expedition as a jumping off point, Simmons adds a big old monster to the horrors of the arctic. Which is the main problem.

The monster just didn't work for me, at all. 
This is partly due to the jumping back and forward narrative in the first half of the book. There was no suspense to the monsters arrival, it was always there. 
Also, the monster is pretty much invincible, ubiquitous, omnipresent and generally all-round unstoppable. Even the Xenomorph in the Alien movies didn't like fire much. If it turns up, it kills people.
Which leads on to the next point. It seems so random. It turns up as a lazy plot device every so often. "Oh, there hasn't been a monster for a while, oooh look there it is"
Also, if it so damn dangerous, why does it take so long for all the characters to start taking it seriously "Oh i'm just going to go out of the ship and look at this thing" WHY???? 

The Non-monster stuff was pretty great , the arctic wastes were incredibly well realised, the non-monster horrors, both terrain-based and human based were the genuinely scary stuff.

Oh, it's also waaaaay too long,but that's a bit of a given with Simmons.

Aaron Bach

What a disappointment. 

After truly enjoying the mysterious, enthralling tale provided by Drood, I thought that Simmons' prior work of historical fiction would be just as alluring. Unfortunately, The Terror suffers from the same main problem that plagued Drood: the story's buildup and the shroud of mystery surrounding the main antagonist lead to extreme letdown. However, whereas the entirety of Drood's story somewhat made up for its anticlimactic ending, The Terror's story - while chilling in many ways - just isn't good enough to survive its "ending-letdown."

Simmons does a great job weaving 700+ pages worth of the horrific nature of Arctic sailing, where incessant cold, poisoned food, scurvy, and the unknown create a constant state of unease; however, this tale never seems to go anywhere. Whereas Drood made me insanely curious to find out what would happen next, The Terror left me in a constant state of "Can we move on, please?" There are only so many times one can endure a repetitive chapter cycle - recount who is dead and how they died, wander down a long flashback that doesn't endear me to its character, etc. - before boredom begins to set in.

I give this book 3 stars because at its core, The Terror is a fantastic set piece that manages to sustain a constant state of unease and weave in fantastic scenes (such as the carnivale, the failed bear-blind, etc.). However, at its weakest points (including the final 100 pages, which, of all possible ending scenarios, sufficiently destroyed any suspense/intrigue/excitement that had been building up), The Terror drifts along, never truly sure of where it wants to go.

Noah Cross

Dima Sidorov

Cass Fox

Nicholas Zachariou

Sunky

Eva Ströberg

Jackson Weaver

Ryan Mateyk

The men on board Her Britannic Majesty's Ships Terror and Erebus had every expectation of triumph. They were part of Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition - as scientifically advanced an enterprise as had ever set forth - and theirs were the first steam-driven vessels to go in search of the fabled North-West Passage. But the ships have now been trapped in the Arctic ice for nearly two years. Coal and provisions are running low. Yet the real threat isn't the constantly shifting landscape of white or the flesh-numbing temperatures, dwindling supplies or the vessels being slowly crushed by the unyielding grip of the frozen ocean. No, the real threat is far more terrifying. There is something out there that haunts the frigid darkness, which stalks the ships, snatching one man at a time - mutilating, devouring. A nameless thing, at once nowhere and everywhere, this terror has become the expedition's nemesis. When Franklin meets a terrible death, it falls to Captain Francis Crozier of HMS Terror to take command and lead the remaining crew on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. With them travels an Eskimo woman who cannot speak. She may be the key to survival - or the harbinger of their deaths. And as scurvy, starvation and madness take their toll, as the Terror on the ice become evermore bold, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape...

The Terror A Novel

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