While the novel is an intricate and serpentine psychological tale, spiced with its narrator’s lies and self-deceptions and growing drug addiction and casual treacheries, it is also an excellent primer on the crude state of public hygiene roughly a century and a half ago.

Collins’ jealousy of, and contempt for, Dickens wafts from these pages like the stench from a London sewer - and that was a mighty stench indeed, as readers of Drood will discover. It takes a village to raise a child - but perhaps it takes a prairie to turn that child into a great novelist.ĭrood is narrated by Wilkie Collins, the writer who briefly rivaled Dickens for the mantle of most-beloved scribe in mid-19th-century London. A city boy probably couldn’t get his arms around the endlessness that Simmons loves to explore. Maybe that’s why he’s so comfortable with big novels. Simmons, best known for science-fiction novels such as Hyperion (1989) but excelling as well in the mystery and horror genres, was born in Peoria, Ill. You’ll be too enmeshed in the grim ordeals of the hapless men on the doomed British ships Terror and Erebus. The paperback version of Terror runs to almost 1,000 pages, but once you’re locked in harness with the steady march of Simmons’ prose, you won’t notice the gargantuan length. He used the largest, starkest canvas in the world - the bewildering blankness of the mostly uninhabited vastness of the planet’s northernmost regions - to paint with the deepest colors and explore the most intense human emotions: love, hate, fear, envy, hunger, lust, ambition. Simmons specializes in Jumbo Lit, in writing books so big that, as an anonymous British critic once described similarly enormous tomes, they’re fit to “stun a pig.” In The Terror (2007), his sensational seam-buster of a saga about a real-life Arctic expedition in the late 1840s, Simmons showed just what a brilliant author can do if you give him enough elbow room.

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