#54: Dan Simmons’ The Terror
Arctic terror and some weird magical indigenous nonsense
This review was originally posted to Twitter on February 21, 2019
Initial release: 2007
Author: Dan Simmons
Mystery disasters are ripe fodder for writers. Since nobody knows what really happened, there’s plenty of room to write what you want. You can even write a compelling supernatural horror novel… just don’t fuck it up.
Dan Simmons fucked it up.
Simmons has a reputation, much like Stephen King, for writing really long books. Sometimes it works out, sometimes you wish their editors had guns and the will to threaten their writers with them if they write one more goddamn chapter. An 800 page doorstopper can be forgiven if it’s at least compelling, but you have to make it worth it.
Is The Terror worth it? Well, yes and no. The mystery of the doomed Franklin expedition of the late 1840s to find the mythical Northwest Passage through the nightmare maze of northern Canada’s arctic archipelago has captivated explorers for almost 200 years, and Simmons mostly captures it well. Simmons has clearly done his research: the book is filled with little details about the workings of the two expedition ships, their supplies, their crew and their positions. It’s in the vein of Michael Crichton, working overtime to really place the reader there. He jumps about from character to character, though his primary focus is on Captain Crozier, head of the HMS Terror. While I doubt most of the characters resemble their real-life counterparts, the book’s cast generally don’t get too samey for how many there are.
Also commendable is Simmons’ skillfulness in making the two years the ships are frozen in the ice seem interesting and exciting, drawing the reader in with horrifying details about the chill and gloom, of being trapped in ships slowly being destroyed by the ice. It’s oppressive and compelling, and would have made for a good read all by itself. But as this is not just historical fiction, but a horror novel, the crews of the Terror and Erebus are menaced by a strange white monster, bigger than a polar bear, that picks them off one by one.
Referred to almost entirely as “the thing” — a clear homage to the monster in the classic John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There? and its film adaptations — the way it’s described reminds me quite a bit of the Shambler from the original Quake. Whatever it is, it’s clearly something Lovecraftian in nature.
Unfortunately this is where the book starts running into problems. Not the monster per se, but the Inuit stuff surrounding it. The thing starts appearing after a silent Inuit woman and an older, dead Inuit man arrive at the ships. The woman, named Lady Silence by the crew, cannot speak. She’s generally inscrutable and the crews regard her as a witch and/or shamanistic rescuer, and her close ties with the arrival of the thing is made clear in a scene where one character witnesses her in some kind of throat-singing communion with it.
About halfway through the book, the two ships are abandoned, and the crews begin their long, doomed trek to find a river into mainland Canada. The thing stalks them the whole way, and they’re already sick and starving as group cohesion begins to seriously break down. The very end of the book is about where things completely go off the rails. Say what you will about Lovecraft, but he knew when to keep things a mystery. Unfortunately the origins of “the thing on the ice” are wrapped up in an almost wholesale fabrication sold as Inuit mythology. The “magical indigenous people” trope is in full force. While simmons makes a clear distinction between “regular” Inuit (which the book insists on calling the E-word— presumably for “historical accuracy”) and the “magical” ones in charge of managing the monster, it’s still frustrating. Worse, though, is the notion that Captain Crozier not only “goes native” (and knocks up Lady Silence at her behest!) but is inducted into this semi-secret cabal of Inuit supershamans.
Aaaaahhh!!! I get that as a failed captain he wouldn’t want to return to Europe, but aaaahhh!!!
As a historical novel it’s an amazing read, keeping me riveted for hours, and for almost all of it, the horror aspects, both natural and supernatural, are dead-on. But I don’t understand why some writers are compelled to solve their own mysteries and expose their own tricks. It’s a bad case of Stephen King syndrome: a doorstopper that waits ’til the very end to poison the whole book. Simmons’ editor clearly should have been armed.
