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The Terror: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Simmons
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
Buy New: $11.25
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Avg. Customer Rating:  233 reviews
Sales Rank: 276022
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 784
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B001G60FTS
Publication Date: December 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"Dan Simmons writes with the salty grace and precision of Patrick O'Brian. But in piling supernatural nightmare upon historical nightmare, layering mystery upon mystery, he has produced a turbocharged vision of popular doom." -Men's Journal
Greeted with excited critical praise, this extraordinary novel-inspired by the true story of two ice ships that disappeared in the Arctic Circle during an 1845 expedition-swells with the heart-stopping suspense and heroic adventure that have won Dan Simmons praise as "a writer who not only makes big promises but keeps them" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). THE TERROR chills readers to the core.
"Brutal, relentless, yet oddly uplifting, THE TERROR is a masterfully chilling work." -Entertainment Weekly
"In the hands of a lesser writer than Dan Simmons, THE TERROR might well have dissolved into a series of frigid days and three-dog nights. But Simmons is too good a writer to ignore the real gold in his story-its beleaguered cast." -Bookpage
"Guaranteed to have readers pulling their covers up to their noses, THE TERROR will make for a blood-freezing, bedtime read this winter-and any season thereafter." -Pages
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| Customer Reviews: Read 228 more reviews...
 Can't Get It Out Of My Head January 8, 2009
No long, rambling review here. All I have to say is that it's been over two years since I read this one, and nothing quite compares. It stands alone as one of the most uniquely haunting and amazingly written stories I've ever read. By all means, read it.
Like riding a roller coaster in the dark January 6, 2009
The Terror is one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. I picked it up on a whim and, once I'd begun it, read nothing else until I had finished. Dan Simmons has crafted not only a thrilling, terrifying, suspenseful novel, he's written one of the best historical novels I've ever read.
The Terror is the story of the men of HMSs Terror and Erebus, two ships under Sir John Franklin, an ageing explorer looking for the fabled Northwest Passage. During their second winter above the Arctic Circle, the ships are frozen in the ice and, come Spring, the ice doesn't melt. Terror and Erebus and the men aboard them are trapped--for years. But if being trapped in the ice is not in itself unusual, conditions rapidly worsen--almost half the food in storage is found to have gone bad, disease and mutiny threaten the crew, and, after a chance encounter with a mysterious Eskimo woman, the sailors find themselves stalked through the long winter night by a savage monster.
This is only the barest of summaries--Simmons's novel is over 950 pages and he packs them full. It's unusual to see a novel this long that doesn't drag, which is why it reminded me of that old cliche used of action movies--the roller coaster, although this novel is like riding a coaster in the dark. The Terror hurtles along through suspense and terror like a roller coaster, but just when you feel the novel is slowing down, some new event or subplot emerges from the darkness and takes you by surprise.
Simmons's characters are all well-drawn and realistic, especially the major players--Captains Crozier and Fitzjames, young surgeon Goodsir, Lieutenant Irving, the treacherous Hickey, and the mysterious, tongueless Eskimo woman called Lady Silence. And although Simmons is working with dozens of characters, many of them winding through multiple plots and subplots, it's easy to keep track of who's who.
One thing I especially like about The Terror is that the author clearly takes the "historical" part of "historical fiction" seriously. The book is minutely detailed about conditions on shipboard life and the frozen north, and all the details help sell the story as real. My only beef with the novel is that it seems a little modern in a few ways--some of the characters show a distinctly 21st-century preoccupation with sex and some of the language is jarringly Vietnam-era.
Finally, this book is an unusually literate thriller. There are numerous references to Dante and Shakespeare, asides about contemporary writers Dickens and Poe (who himself wrote a novel of shipwreck and exploration), nods to Hobbes and Darwin, and, in one of my favorite passages, a brilliantly reworked version of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death."
The Terror is a brilliantly plotted, exhaustively researched excursion into history with enough of the fantastic thrown in to thrill any reader. This is what historical fiction should be.
Highly recommended.
A captivating, awe-inspiring epic. January 6, 2009
Every now and then, a new book will come out that redefines the boundaries of its respective genre. Dan Simmons's THE TERROR is one such novel--with its clever blending of historic fact, scientific research, mythological surrealism, and adventurous bravado, THE TERROR has turned the horror genre on its head.
The whole novel revolves around a rather intriguing concept: What really happened to Sir John Franklin's 1845 voyage to the Northwest Passage? All we really know is that the two ships--the Erebus and the aptly-named Terror--vanished. Simmons has decided to take advantage of his literary license, and has crafted a nine-hundred-page-plus epic spanning the plight of the men stranded on the ice. The novel picks up roughly two years into the ordeal, after Sir John Franklin has perished, leaving Captain Crozier in charge. The men are running out of food; the winters are getting colder; and there is something on the ice, some monstrous creature that is toying with the dying men. Captain Crozier now faces a challenge: Should he stay and fight, resulting in almost-certain death; or should he and his men make one last-ditch effort to escape the frozen Hell that surrounds them?
Do not underestimate THE TERROR. It is perhaps the most literate horror novel I have read in years; it is intelligent, well-researched, and thoroughly gripping. The fact that it is based upon a true-life mystery adds a bit of allure, granted; but the action here is all Simmons's creation, and his imagination is feverish and frightening. THE TERROR is as much an adventure novel as it is a horror novel; there is a monster on the ice, but there are other monsters: the cold, scurvy, encroaching insanity...THE TERROR is truly an epic novel, one that is engrossing from first to last page. If this were a just world, Simmons would be winning awards right and left. For now, it looks as though he'll have to settle for having written a novel that, I'm willing to bet, will stand the test of time.
 Lizzie December 29, 2008
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Utter waste of time. Billed as based on true history, but nothing of the kind, this book starts well and proceeds gripplingly. After reading hundreds of pages, I threw the book out in utter disgust at the shabby writing and ridiculous premise, as it turned out. Unfortunately, once it has pulled you well and truly in, it dissolves into a fantasy land of imaginary Eskimo lore and thousand year past false imagery, as well as truly gross and bizarre universal love triangulation.
 Great Premise with Flawed Execution December 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked up "The Terror" because I saw it on a couple of Top Ten lists for 2007 and the plot was intriguing. The author, Dan Simmons, took the true story of the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic (which was never heard from again) and imagined a fate for the crew. In his fictional version, the two ships are trapped in the ice and the sailors are gradually killed off by a mysterious and terrifying creature.
I have mixed feelings about this novel. I really liked the premise, and the early scenes with the monster are chilling. However, I almost gave up on it halfway through. As many reviewers here have said, the book is too long. It felt like Simmons had to cram in every bit of research he had done, and unfortunately he often sacrificed the momentum of the story to too much unnecessary detail.
Also, the novel is very inconsistent. The opening chapters jump back and forth in time, but then this stops and they start progressing linearly. Initially each chapter shifts between the perspective of certain key characters, but then the perspective starts moving to lesser characters who do not add a lot to the story (like Peglar and Bridgens). And there are odd shifts in tone. Even though this is primarily a realistic story, I could accept the idea of the crew being stalked by a monster, but it was jarring when one of the characters suddenly and inexplicably starts having clairvoyant dreams, and the ending veers into bizarre esquimaux mythology.
On the plus side, Simmons is a fine writer. His research is impeccable, and he certainly evokes shipboard life and what it was like to live in the unending cold of the Arctic. He gives the historic characters interesting personalities and you feel a sense of loss as certain ones die. His scary scenes are effectively tense and creepy. The section where a party of sailors first encounter the monster in the middle of a lightning storm is very unsettling.
So I can't give the book a whole-hearted recommendation. It has a good set-up, but an unsatisfying resolution. If you have a deep interest in Arctic exploration, you will probably enjoy much of this. If you are looking for a straightforward horror story, this is not it.
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