Dan Simmons very long epic telling of the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition tells us the story of the two ships after they disappeared into the Arctic Ocean in an attempt to discover the Northwest Passage. While little is known of the crews' fates, it is not hard to speculate as to what much of what occurred. But Simmons added to the horror of their fate by introducing an even worse horror than a slow death on the ice; an unknown monster of unimaginable strength and cunning that hunted and butchered the ever-dwindling number of sailors and marines as they struggled through the polar winter in their vain attempt to reach civilization.

It has been a long, fascinating, bleak, wonderful, terrible, long, and excellent literary journey that I am tremendously grateful rather experience through literature. And did I say it was long?

My thanks to the folks at the  Horror Aficionados group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.

WOW! This historic tale of a doomed arctic expedition set in 1845 aboard the HMS TERROR is based on true events and one horrific adventure complete with unbelievably brutal sub-zero temperatures, and a terrifying monster from hell. Loaded with great characters including the mysterious 'Lady Silence' and a unique and surprising ending to say the least. While sometimes descriptively gruesome, an engaging story and thrilling read!

I’ve been waiting to write this review for weeks. I am titling it @Dan Simmons: meet me in the pit.

To say I struggled through the last two thirds of this book would not be overstating it. Those who know me on other social media platforms know how much I enjoyed the show. I was warned that the book would not be Like That and yet I thought I could persevere.

I was wrong.

Listen, at some point I’m going to stop assuming that the weird thing about finding the 15-yo girl sexy is an opinion of the characters, if several characters express this opinion independently of each other, and ask myself what’s up with the author. I’ve been thinking that maybe I could offer a service for male authors, where every time they describe a female character’s breasts but not, you know, her CHARACTER, I spray them with a plant mister until they stop. Lemme know what you think.

LEAVING ASIDE the fact that nearly the only female character is a sexualized GIRL, I was a little bit confused. The author wanted me to believe that 1) Crozier is the only one who still carries hope for the survival of the crew and 2) he firmly believes that life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I don’t know about you guys, but I found that a little hard – either you have hope or you don’t. Unrelatedly, if I want bad takes on Hobbes, I’ll go back to my second semester state theory class. Like seriously, for someone who claims to only believe in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Crozier has a poor understanding of the text. [Bridgens voice: READ A BOOK.]

I know that my disappointment with the book mainly stems from its tone. I didn’t want to compare it to the show, but when you do, it’s almost like you’re seeing two different stories – one in which tragedy reveals not only the worst but also the best in people, our shared humanity and the wish to help each other. In the other story, it’s every man for himself and somehow, we’re expected to believe that.

This was my first hate-read in a long while. If I hadn’t been so invested in the characters to begin with, I wouldn’t have finished it, and even then, I struggled.

Is the Terror a mythical beast in the Arctic? The Tuunbaq?
Is the Terror Her Majesty’s Ship of the same name?
Is the Terror nights that never end?
Is the Terror a Ripper style murderer and his penchant for mutilation?
Is the Terror knowledge?
Is the Terror sodomy?
Is the Terror a silent Esqimaux?
Is the Terror scurvy?
Is the Terror unrelenting ice floes?
Is the Terror belief?
Is the Terror remembrance?
Is the Terror dreams?
Is the Terror the past?
Is the Terror cannibalism?
Is the Terror doubt?
Is the Terror hope?
Is the Terror ignorance?
Is the Terror magic?
Is the Terror misunderstanding?
Is the Terror fire?
Is the Terror interminable cycles?
Is the Terror hubris?
Is the Terror hate?
Is the Terror capitalism?
Is the Terror “civilization”?
Is the Terror humanity?
Is the Terror the unknown?
Is the Terror failure?
Is the Terror duty?
Is the Terror ego?
Is the Terror alcohol?
Is the Terror visions and hallucinations?
Is the Terror death?
Is the Terror suffering?
Is the Terror starvation?
Is the Terror ice?
Is the Terror morality?
Is the Terror shame?
Is the Terror foolishness?
Is the Terror delusion?
Is the Terror love?
Is the Terror life?
Is the Terror solitude?

The Terror is a fictional tale based on the real life experience of the notoriously doomed John Franklin Expedition.

These brave men journeyed hundreds of miles by sea voyage in the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, part of the British Naval fleet sent to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in 1845–1848, and then travelled the rest on foot into the desolate, below-freezing temperatures of the Arctic wasteland.

n  n

All died or were never seen or heard from ever again.



Dan Simmons imaginative story explains how and why.

The Terror is a book drawn from a historical background so deep and so thoroughly well-researched that I'm quite sure I've never heard of any other writer of fiction attempting to do so at this level ever before.

For those that like to pick apart every bit of a story with a goal in mind to repute the validity of the facts given, you won't find much to work with here.

Set in the harshest conditions, with handfuls of men that may be hard to discern not only which side of the fence they're on, but just who is who for a ways, these characters aren't so much as enjoyable as they are absorbing. As their living conditions become more severe and their hardships grow more intense, good decision-making is made less and less often. Way below freezing temperatures, sparse food supplies, sickness, soreness, etc., would be tragic for even the most stalwart of men.



The Terror, providentially, is more than all this. What is it exactly? ~ This is a horror book, right? Yes. Even though it didn't have to be. Dan Simmons could have left out all the fantastical elements in his historical tale and it would've been enough to cringe to and have nightmares about and be fascinated by all the same. But, he didn't stop there, thankfully.



So what is The Terror exactly? Is it a man? Is it natural, man-made, myth or legend? The word Tuunbaq comes up. Is it a living creature, a guardian spirit, or an evil elder monster from eons past, or maybe something from another world?

n   ~ Is it the Wendigo? Or possibly a Yeti? ~n  
n

n   ~ A Polar Bear gone mad with frenzy? ~n

n   ~ Is it the mythical Tuunbaq, maybe? ~ n

I can't say.

The story itself is very long, a bit heavy, hopeless, and as can only be expected, if you don't stay on it you will probably confuse a few of the officers with eachother which could result in you wanting to forget the whole thing altogether.

This book cannot be compared to Simmons previous novels in any shape or form. This book is not science-fiction nor does it have the framework or set-up of a traditional horror tale either.

For anyone fascinated with historical adventures and cryptid horror and for readers who crave oldschool antiquated storytelling.

It takes an investment of time and patience beyond the norm that should be very rewarding if you stay with it until the end. I thought it was truly great and really enjoyed all the finer details that breached to the surface.



If you are a modern reader and you only like *page-turners*, this is certainly not for you. If you have a million and one things going on at once, just say no for now. If you are into comic book type action of super-heroic proportions, not for you. If you like quick answers and are impatient in any way I suggest reading something else. If you are somebody who needs happy American-style endings to your movie, where you finally get the girl and there's a big smooch in the end with sunlight or fireworks streaming in the background, don't even touch this book for fear you might be infected by the dreadful truth of reality.

There are many reasons why you should want to read this though. In this book you will share and feel the experience the crew are feeling: the cold, the despair, the loneliness, the dread and terror of the unknown, unstoppable creature, and the tragic understanding of, what inevitably feels to be, a hopeless outcome. You might feel the need to put on layers and layers of clothing, and stand so close to a fire you may be tempted to put your hands and feet right into it. You will feel like you are living this book.



I believe it is Dan Simmons magnum opus. I give it 5 stars not because I'm necesarily going to return and re-read it again anytime soon but because, other than being a tad too long, it is flawless. It doesn't fall into modern traps or pitfalls of always trying to please the reader nor does it have the feeling of a Hollywood movie where you know your main characters are going to survive to the end, regardless of any other surprises.

This is the real deal. Live it. Experience it. Draw from it.

Then pick up some fluffy fun read you can rollercoaster through for 2 days straight to a walloping climax so you can recuperate and recover.

* For fans of the book, you will be glad to know AMC is bringing it to television in the form of a tv series and if that news isn't good enough, Ridley Scott is purportedly producing it and my guess is he may even direct an episode or two.

** There have been several releases of this book, even a few just recently. I prefer the standard-sized 2009 paperback release. It has a little better cover art than some of the others, having distinct yellow and white embossed lettering, and inside and on the back, a lot of cool quotes and kudo's by reviewers and other notable authors.

Kind of fun to read what others have to say about this extraordinary novel.

Highly recommended!!!!!

'If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the arctic night under a sky gone mad, toward a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilized hearth?'

Review to follow.

‘The Terror’can be shelved under several genres: historical fiction, horror, adventure. Wherever it is shelved, it is a fantastic read. However, it is long, with horrifying and graphic descriptions of illnesses, injuries and violent attacks. Since it is a fictionalized story about people who really existed (it is based on a real English explorer, Captain Franklin, and his last voyage to the Arctic), it has a lot of interesting details about what it was like to be a ship-based explorer in the mid-1800's from actual diaries and stories.

‘The Terror' never falls apart in its story of relentless frights, but you as the reader might if you tend to empathize with its likable characters.

I loved the book. I think it was very meta, so most things in it were both symbolic as well as describing actual physical objects and scenes. I think the monster, for instance, was both an actual mythic monster and a symbol of the brutality of nature.

A book this relentlessly awful and depressing HAD to have a Hollywood ending for me, otherwise I would have felt too horrified by it to like it. I'm glad for my sake it wasn't more sad than it is. I realize that the real life explorers very likely died horribly of starvation, and accident, and scurvy, but 900+ pages of fictional death death death death would have been too much for me eventually to finish. There is some closure (I know that word is overused, but it fits) at the end.

The character Hickey goes on my list of one of the most horrifying fictional evil bad guys ever, alongside Hannibal the Cannibal. But unlike some readers whose reviews I have read on GR, I did not see any homosexuality presented as an evil. Hickey was simply an evil man, full stop. Hickey’s homosexual behavior, in my opinion, was a means to hook him up with Magnus, otherwise it would have been harder to set up the relationship. Hickey committed an evil in using Magnus as an assassin when Magnus had a child-like mentality and obviously could not understand fully why he was being ordered to kill people. Hickey also took advantage of Magnus's very innocent love, too. Hickey was a person who could manipulate others into evil acts without caring whether people trusted or loved him. He only cared about having power over people. Hickey didn't give a damn who he destroyed.

Frankly, I thought the author was presenting homosexuality as a simple fact of life, in itself something not fraught with any moral presumptions at all. I thought the takeaway was a demonstration of how evil Hickey was in faking empathy and love, not in how homosexual he was, gentle reader. Obviously, I disagree with some reviews on this issue. Besides, there is another homosexual relationship among the sailors which is very natural and emotionally normal.

Since the subject of cannibalism is explored in the novel, I thought about what I'd do. If I'm in my full senses, I could NEVER keep such meat down. But if I was feverish and half insane with scurvy and food poisoning and exhaustion? Walking for ten hours hauling fully loaded sleds in -60 F temperatures and doing it on two moldy biscuits and a slice of salted beef a day, with my skin and body rotting while I lived? I don't know. Perhaps, gentle reader, you must never test me...

Sounds of arctic ice: https://youtu.be/vjtX4GJPFRc

Youtube link to a history about the real Franklin expedition: https://youtu.be/7-c2EFFGBww

Youtube link to an AMC series trailer about a series based on this book: https://youtu.be/OPuYei9cbaw

“Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”

The Terror. What to say about it?

It's long. It's well-researched. It's inventive. It's creepy. It's brutal. It makes you feel the cold.

If it weren't for the end, I may have gone with 4. It's not easy to rate. So much of it is worth 5 star, a few pushes it back, I'll be uncertain again and settle with 4.5

Embarrassingly, I had no idea this was based on a true story until I read it. Reminds me of a co-worker, who used to be a history teacher, telling me the story of a young girl in line pissed at him for spoiling the "ending" of Titanic when they were in line waiting for the movie.

I do think, as I often do with long books, that some trimming would have helped it. That said, the slow pacing is well suited to the historical horror tale where the ambience of the freezing winter is as important to the story as the story itself. You can't rush through the ice.

For a lengthy tome with many, many characters, Simmons did the right thing by limiting the point of view. Having it first point of view would have made no sense at all and would have been lesser quality, but focusing in the minds of a few important characters - and a few who were smaller but played important roles after all - was the right thing. None of the characters were perfect, but they were all intriguing in their way.

There are scenes that pissed me off, of course. The Eskimo scene, how utterly depressing this book was, some of the circumstances that befall favorites. Scurvy = *shivers*. Still, this isn't supposed to be an uplifting book after all. The author throws us a bone with the last two hundred pages at least.

This long book is available in different page counts, some bizarrely different, in all forms - I was delighted to finally open my Hardcover of this one, but also have the kindle version AND the brilliant audiobook I supplemented it with. I finally cleaned some listening to it, yay for my house. It was getting scary in here. Tom Sellwood does an excellent job. I read reviews that his whispering annoyed people, but I found hardly any whispering. Really, it's a well-done audio. Have patience for the long trip since this is a long journey that needs a lot of pages, but really the narrator was an exceptional choice. Bravo.

The Esquimaux lady was one of my favorites, but Captain Crozier wins in the male department, despite me thinking he was wrong with a particular whipping scene.

Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir was a much-needed softer touch who tales a lot of the story through his journal writing, starting with excited and jubilant hope like a small boy about to go on a big trip. He keeps up the heart of his character by wanting to help the men as best as he could, although I could have slapped him with an amputation scene - let some die in peace, already!

“I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility. But there is little that I - or any surgeon in the Year of Our Lord 1848 - can do. God help us all.”

Franklin...there's surprises - he's not a favorite but his chapters are well done and interesting in getting into the head of the character of the man's mind and giving all this disaster a plausible starting point. It was pretty hard not to love the Ice Master.

Then there's the monster. Sometimes I don't think we even needed a monster. It comes together at at the end to fit legend and lore and more layers than a general adventure story, though. Just keep reading.

In 2014 we found the remains of the Erebus, and 2016 we have finally found the remains of the Terror. To name a ship that in the first place almost seems to be an omen of impending doom and disaster.

The book works well with ambience and characters that I've covered, but the horrors of scurvy are also well done, as is the freezing with breaking teeth (yikes) and the effects of starvation. Men turning on each other is inevitable. The author didn't have this happen as brutally as it could have -- sure, we get some true horrible villains, but most of the honor and bonding of the men stayed in force besides one particular group.

“Trust me. I’ve seen it in London and I’ve seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight."

The Terror is too large to be defined by genre. There's horror, but there's a survival story, there's drama, there's intensity of legend and fantasy. A creative play on a real-life disaster, Simmons beautiful writing brings the haunting story to new depths with an almost mystical landing.

Still processing this one, not sure how I feel yet, but I'm going with four stars just for the setting, atmosphere, and utter despair that the men went through.

An honestly amazing piece of historical fiction. The writing is fantastic, with a slow but steady grinding up of the horror of the situation these doomed explorers find themselves in.

It’s a true mark of great authorship that such a slowly paced novel nevertheless feels like a page turner. The characters are so well drawn, the story painted so well, and the slow-seeping sense of ever-deepening dread and despair is somehow always fired by a spark of hope that refuses to be extinguished.

The Terror is the ultimate tale of the human struggle for survival. Dan Simmon’s huge tome is based on Sir John Franklin’s failed 1845 exploration of the Northwest Passage. In real life the crew of the two ships, the Terror and Erebus, all perished. However, Simmons portrays a fictionalized account of this expedition by expanding this historical narrative into a horror story by dropping in a man eating ice monster to make everybody’s day just a little bit shittier.

My initial reaction was that the book was several hundred pages too long and focused much more on the harsh arctic conditions and the immeasurable suffering that the crew experienced rather than on plot. However, as I read on, the long descriptive passages and the descriptions of pain and suffering are meant to draw the reader into the story and gain a true understanding of the brutality of the arctic and it's devastating effects on both the human body and soul.

As the crew’s hopes of being rescued slowly dissipates, I learned that once the dim flame of hope in man’s heart is forever extinguished, man will stop at nothing to survive. Many of the scenes are very graphic and many moral questions about the extent of man's will to survive come into play. As far as the ice monster is concerned, I believe that this is an unnecessary character in the story. This monster was only used as a plot device to add more color and draw in more readers so that this book does not stay trapped in a strictly historical fiction setting. Overall, Simmons depicts a very grim but otherwise realistic account of this failed expedition and, in doing so, has crafted a work of fiction that explores some of the darkest depths of the human soul.

“Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.”
“The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.”
This novel is based on actual events on the expedition to find the North West Passage which set off in 1845 and never returned. It was led by John Franklin and there were two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The main character though is the captain of the Terror, Francis Crozier. A certain level of commitment is needed for this as it is 937 pages long. It is also probably a good winter read, because however cold you are, the characters in the book are an awful lot colder. Simmons is usually a sci-fi writer, but here he not only branches off into a historical novel, he adds a slice of horror as well. A small hint as to outcomes, not a spoiler, but the expedition did not return and no trace was found of them.
The horror part is based on Native American folklore and myth and there are Native American characters who have some significance later in the novel. The whole is quite claustrophobic (and cold), confined to the two ships and the area around them.
There has been a good deal of speculation about what exactly happened to the expedition. Simmons pretty much throws every possible problem at the crew: These include scurvy, hypothermia, malnutrition, starvation, cabin fever, paranoia, lead poisoning from contaminated food, cannibalism, mutiny, the “creature” on the ice (here’s the folklore element) and sheer coldness. This is a very long novel and there are a finite number of ways that intense cold and lots of ice can be described. The novel is told from a number of points of view and switches between them pretty regularly. That does break up what can become monotonous.
Ultimately I am not sure if Simmons wanted to write a historical novel or a horror novel; I don’t think it really works as both. The ending feels a bit trite and the mysticism towards the end didn’t sit easily with the rest of the book. Some of the encounters with the “creature” began to remind me a little of Jaws (on ice of course) and this was the least convincing part of the book, especially when it was all explained towards the end.
I’m not sure Simmons gets the nineteenth century idiom correct and he throws in some twentieth century terms on a regular basis. He also uses the word “tits”, which is a very twentieth century term. Which brings me to another point. The one female character is a Native American/Inuit woman, who is called Lady Silence by the crew. Simmons come up with this classy literary passage:
“Lady Silence was about twenty feet away across a smooth blue-ice space. . . . She was naked, kneeling on thick furs. . . . [Irving] could see the curve of her right breast . . . [and] the hillocked flesh of her firm backside.”
Hillocked? Really? Hillocked?
Some of the descriptions of what happens to the crew is also pretty graphic:
“Goodsir rolled the corpse over while Fitzjames removed his jacket and beat out the flames rising from the dead man’s face and hair. Harry Goodsir felt as if he were watching all this from a great distance. The professional part of his mind noticed with cool detachment that the furnace, as poorly banked as the low coal flames had been, had melted the man’s eyes, burned away his nose and ears, and turned his face into the texture of an overbaked, bubbling raspberry flan.”
Many people really enjoyed this, so maybe I’m turning into and old grouch!