Publisher : Hachette Audio
Publication Date : 2009 02 09
>> Drood by Dan Simmons
Absolutely brilliant
Dan Simmons weaves a hell of a story with a stunningly written Drood Starring Wilkie Collins Charles Dickens and the mysterious Edwin Drood among other real and fictional Victorian characters the story explores the labyrinth of the London Underworld the friendship and collaboration of two well known and gifted writers the unfinished last work of Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood and a purely fictional story of murder mayhem and misogyny
Impeccably researched and filled with fast paced prose I honestly felt like I was transported to Victorian England as I waited for the serialization of the next Dickens s or Collins s novel to appear on the newsstands When Simmons walks us through the dark passages that conceal the underground cemeteries opium dens and catacombs of London we follow along When he reports the train wreck at Staplehurst we experience the loss of life and limb on a personal level and we feel the victim s pain When he depicts the lives of the novelists we gain a sense of what life must have been like in their households
I thoroughly enjoyed this fast paced page turning phenomenon You should too
5 out of 5 stars
>> Ponderous rambling and ultimately unsatisfying
I get the feeling that Simmons until now a sub Stephen King horror/fantasy writer may have intended Drood as his bid for quality lit what he s come up with is a failure both as a genre page turner and a literary novel at nearly 800 pages it s windy rambling and incoherent Simmons s protagonist is repellent and unsympathetic the plot not much more than a series of silly and repetitive Grand Guignol set pieces jerks and wheezes without ever developing any real momentum until the last 200 pages or so at which time it races to a limp unsatisfying conclusion as though the author himself had grown sick of the whole enterprise To make things worse Simmons s approximation of 19th century English prose is even more tedious than the real thing
As other reviewers have commented this might have made an interesting 300 page novel at 800 it s a long and painful slog with little reward
>> Hugely disappointing
Dan Simmons mammoth novel Drood is historical fiction centered around two of 19th century British literature s most prominent figures Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins It is narrated by Wilkie Collins and chronicles the last five years of Charles Dickens life and his growing obsession with a mysterious figure named Drood Drood is a menacing character that Dickens encounters in the aftermath of a tragic train accident Drood becomes the inspiration for Dickens last unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood The narrative follows Collins day to day life his interactions with Charles Dickens and their hunt for Drood through London s seamy underbelly opium dens back alleys cemeteries and all other manner of creepy gaslit Victorian places
I ve made no secret for years that I love The Alienist by Caleb Carr It is quite simply the best work of modern fiction I ve read and my gold standard for historical mystery/thrillers So when I saw Drood sitting on my neighborhood bookseller s shelf I practically drooled on it The summary promises a thrill ride of mystery and suspense What the book actually delivers is a long winded meandering nonsensical narrative as seen through the eyes of a thoroughly unstable opium addict in Collins
From the outset I disliked the character of Charles Dickens not a redeeming quality to be found especially when seen through the eyes of Drood s whiny jealous tripped out narrator Collins The novel is heavily laden with unrelated and rambling historical asides some of which repeat themselves I kept with it thinking that all of these side roads might eventually come together in some way that was relevant or revealing to the plot They don t And then there is the story itself The build up scene to Charles Dickens second encounter with Drood was mouth wateringly good a grimy trip through Bluegate Fields opium dens and a crypt with secret passages under it only to culminate in Dickens being whisked away in a gondola piloted by two men in tights yes tights on a river of sewage We later learn that they took him to Drood s huge Egyptian style fortress in some sort of secret London sewer city where he and Drood sipped tea and chatted about mesmerism Uh huh That marked the first time of several that I set this book aside with a vow to read no more
Ultimately though I kept with it and finished all 784 painful psychedelic pages But I am sorry to report that my opinion of this book never improved As narrator Collins drug problem grows the story just gets weirder and weirder leaving the reader to decide what is real and what is an opium induced fantasy Some are easy like the green skinned woman with tusks for teeth That s right green skin and tusks Sigh I give it 2 stars rather than one simply because I think Simmons did an admirable job of assuming the voice of Wilkie Collins An authentic sounding Victorian voice is tricky to achieve let alone maintain for 700 pages I also appreciate how much research it must have taken to write it That said I just can t recommend Drood What a disappointment This review originally appeared on my blog See my profile for details
