Summary:
On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever. Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying? Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.
Library Journal Review:
Titled in reference to Dickens's unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Simmons's latest (after The Terror) casts one grotesque-the drug-addled and paranoid Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White-to write about another grotesque, Charles Dickens, who's bursting with energy and colossal egotism, already secure in his position as England's greatest living writer. Collins becomes convinced that they are both being pursued by a vampiric mass murderer named Drood. Drood's eyelids have been excised and his teeth filed to points. He has mastered the ancient Egyptian black arts, and he leads an army of undead followers who live in the sewers and caverns beneath London. But is Drood real, or is he a phantasm of Collins's opium-filled brain? This sprawling monster of a novel is Collins-like in its exotic extravagance, Dickensian in its sharply delineated characters, major and minor. Simmons has captured to a tee the high style of late Victorian melodrama: the story line is consistently engrossing and utterly unpredictable. This rip-roaring adventure is a true page-turner. Enthusiastically recommended for all popular collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/08.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
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