Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4162 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 784 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316007023
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bestseller Simmons (The Terror) brilliantly imagines a terrifying sequence of events as the inspiration for Dickens's last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in this unsettling and complex thriller. In the course of narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck and trying to rescue fellow passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin. Along with his real-life novelist friend Wilkie Collins, who narrates the tale, Dickens pursues the elusive Drood, an effort that leads the pair to a nightmarish world beneath London's streets. Collins begins to wonder whether the object of their quest, if indeed the man exists, is merely a cover for his colleague's own murderous inclinations. Despite the book's length, readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles, which will remind many of the work of Charles Palliser and Michael Cox. 4-city author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
In this creepy intertextual tale of professional jealousy and possible madness, Wilkie Collins tells of his friendship and rivalry with Charles Dickens, and of the mysterious phantasm named Edwin Drood, who pursues them both. Drood, cadaverous and pale, first appears at the scene of a railway accident in which Dickens was one of the few survivors; later, Dickens and Collins descend into London�s sewer in search of his lair. Meanwhile, a retired police detective warns Collins that Drood is responsible for more than three hundred murders, and that he will destroy Dickens in his quest for immortality. Collins is peevish, vain, and cruel, and the most unreliable of narrators: an opium addict, prone to nightmarish visions. The narrative is overlong, with discarded subplots and red herrings, but Simmons, a master of otherworldly suspense, cleverly explores envy�s corrosive effects.
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Louis Bayard "My name is Wilkie Collins," announces the narrator of "Drood," "and my guess, since I plan to delay the publication of this document for at least a century and a quarter beyond the date of my demise, is that you do not recognise my name." Au contraire, Wilkie! We know and love you still. Has any thriller ever boasted a better opening sequence than your "Woman in White"? Has any detective story employed multiple narrators more artfully than your "Moonstone"? Has anyone produced so many sinfully entertaining books while maintaining an opium habit that made Thomas de Quincey look like a dabbler? No, Wilkie, you're still the man. And in fact, your provocative social critiques and nuanced portraits of women make you look considerably more modern than the Victorian aesthetes who thumbed their noses at you. But I admit that, in the opening pages of Dan Simmons's historical thriller, you're in bad shape, Wilkie. In your 40s and already a near-invalid, with rheumatic gout so painful you can hardly see to write. You're living with a woman who's not your wife (you've tried, not very successfully, to pass her off as your housekeeper), and you've got another mistress stashed in private lodgings, and they each want more of you than you have to give. And, to make matters worse, you're seeing things. A scary gal with green skin and yellow tusk-teeth who wants to fling you down the stairs. And a silent doppelganger -- "the Other Wilkie" -- who comes when he's least wanted and even writes parts of your books for you. And writes better than you! Speaking of which, you have the signal misfortune of being best pals with Charles Dickens ("the Inimitable," you call him, not very respectfully). A leading light of the age is our Dickens, which means that everyone around him must learn to live in his shadow or else rage at the dying of the light. And now Dickens . . . here's where fact gives way to fiction . . . has drawn you into his private mythos, which revolves around a half-Egyptian underworld fiend named Drood. Hard to miss, this fella, with his scarred head and missing eyelids and "a nose that looked to have been mostly amputated in some terrible surgery" and "ears that were little more than stubs." This same Drood, according to a retired police inspector, is London's "least notorious but most successful serial murderer." You're skeptical, and no wonder. "There is no Drood," you declare flatly. "Only a legend." But then the legend makes himself known to you in truly terrible fashion. And you realize that the only way to be rid of him is to rid yourself of Dickens. Which will have the not unincidental effect of forcing Dickens to acknowledge you as an equal, if not a superior. Drood, as one might expect, bears a nominal relation to Dickens's unfinished final volume, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," but it plays out more as a cross between "Amadeus" and "The Usual Suspects." As hybrids go, that has the potential for some horsepower, especially because Simmons, in earlier days, was a much-lauded sci-fi writer, and the pictorial imagination he brought to that earlier genre pays handsome dividends here. In one hallucinatory moment, Collins sees the audience at Dickens's public reading tied by "hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords." Books are "dalmatianed with spattered ink," a nasty black scarab burrows into a human belly "as if flesh were sand" and a man looks down at himself and sees "the hands of a corpse disappearing into chalk." The most successful of the book's set pieces is in the very first chapter, when the train carrying Dickens and his mistress plunges from the Staplehurst viaduct. This real-life incident becomes almost unbearably vivid in Simmons's hands: "Dickens watched a man stagger towards him, arms outstretched as if for a welcoming hug. The top of the man's skull had been torn off rather the way one would crack an eggshell with a spoon in preparation for breakfast." Equally vivid is the guided tour of "Undertown," a labyrinth of crypts, tunnels, caverns and underground rivers where Drood rules over a small nation of feral children and opium addicts. It's when Simmons takes his book aboveground that he loses his way -- in a forest of factoids. For long stretches, "Drood" is little more than warmed-over biography, larded with the minutiae of London sewage systems and Dickens's Italian travels and his fistula surgery and the names of the dogs who visited his estate and the titles of every last reference work consulted by Collins during the writing of "The Moonstone" . . . and then more of same. "Perhaps I have already mentioned . . . ," Simmons's narrator murmurs. "Perhaps you also know . . . . Perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader . . . . I may have mentioned earlier . . . ." You have. You have. And, like the arch-villains he portrays, Simmons gang-presses his characters into historical servitude. "Oh, Mr. Collins!" cries one. "I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr. Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities ended." People don't actually talk like this, any more than they say, "Dickens's novel -- which I thought rather dreary and stodgy to that point, especially in the person of the cloying and saccharine narratoress named Esther Summerson, did seem to come alive in the penultimate chapters as our Inspector Bucket took charge of the murder case regarding Lawyer Tulkinghorn, as well as in his fruitless but exciting pursuit of Lady Dedlock, Esther's true mother, who was to die outside the city burial ground." This padding and sock-puppetry come at some cost: The book is halfway over before it feels like it's beginning. (Drood even pauses in the midst of his evil-doing to announce the species of beetle he uses.) Simmons may justify his novel's length as a tribute to the enormity of evil or perhaps to the bagginess of Dickens's own fiction. But "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," had it been finished, would have been one of Dickens's most compact productions, and truth be told, this modern-day "Drood" has less to do with evil than with spite. Specifically, the nastiness that a pair of brilliant men inflict on each other. A more apropos title, then, might have been "A Tale of Two Egos," which, all in all, is a worthy subject, but not worth the epic length afforded to it. Inside this artery-clogging almost-800-page book is a sleek and sinewy 300-page thriller waiting to be teased out. If only Simmons hadn't left the job to us.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Deliciously creepy
At nearly 800 pages, Drood is literally a doorstopper of a book. Set in 1865 through 1870, the story centers around Charles Dickens, beginning with his train accident at Staplehurst on the ninth of June. On that very day, as Dickens rushes to assist the dead and dying, he meets a mysterious, and quite creepy, man named Drood. Dickens's story is narrated by Wilkie Collins, both friend and competitor, as Drood plays a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the two authors, in the dangerous underbelly of London.

I had a really, really hard time putting this book down. It's just my kind of novel: lots of adventure, lots of tension. The narrator has a tendency to wander a bit, going off on tangents when he should be following the story, but I didn't see the extra information (and there's a lot of it thrown in) as detracting from it. Rather, I liked all the biographical notes on both Dickens and Collins, and I liked the interactions they had with one another, and the creative give-and-take of information that lead to novels like The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Although Collins talks mostly about Dickens (sometimes with jealousy) and his demons, Collins finds that he has a few demons of his own to vanquish.

The biggest problem I had with this book was the ending. Honestly, I felt a bit cheated: the ending of the book was very anticlimactic, disappointing after all that wonderful buildup. And there are some parts of Chapter 25 that sound as though Simmons ripped them right from the movie The Mummy.

But for the most part, I enjoyed this novel. It contained great characters (though both Dickens and Collins could be infuriating at times), and great suspense.

Don't Judge This Book By Its Jacket
I have been a fan of Dan Simmons work for over 20 years and this is the 25th book that I have read by him. I almost always enjoy his work. That being said I have never been so surprised by all the 5-star reviews for a book as I am with this one. If you read the jacket blurb on Dan Simmons' latest novel you would think that this book was about a mysterious underworld character named Drood, who Charles Dickens obsessed over in the last 5 years of his life. Or you may think that the book is centered on Dickens himself. Both of these sound interesting but unfortunately this book is about neither. It is about, and narrated by, one Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens' friend, collaborator and competitor. This is more of a personal diary than an actual story. When you read this you will want Wilkie to get to the point on Dickens and Drood but what you will get get for most of the book is Wilkie's ramblings about every aspect of his personal life. You will get detailed self-absorbed descriptions about his writing, his 2 relationships with women, his theater work, his dining habits, his relationship with his mother, his appearance, which one of his various places he will sleep on a given night, his increasing dependence on opium, and lengthy descriptions of his domestic situations. Over 771 pages he will spare you no detail. Simmons is a good writer so some of these are interesting or humorous but nowhere close to entertain us over almost 800 pages. Yes, there is a story in here about Dickens and Drood (sort of) but maybe this covers one third of the book. To say that half or more of this book should have been lopped off by a good editor is in no way an exaggeration. But what is truly amazing is that if one manages to wade through all the minutiae of Wilkie Collins' life to get to the meat of the Dickens/Drood story there is an additional caveat - as the story goes on Wilkie is more and more impaired by opium so you can't rely on everything his says being true! Did this event actually happen? Did Wilkie imagine it? Have a hallucination? Often we never find out and you realize that most of this book is pointless. (Now I suspect that the author's response to my criticism would probably point out that this is the point of the book - the jealousy, arrogance and weakness of Collins compared to the great Dickens. That may be so but I personally can't take this in such a large dose, and more importantly no one could possibly get a clue from the marketing of this book that this is in fact what it is about!) I will admit to greatly enjoying the last 50 pages of this book as Wilkie's character is exposed even further; It is just a shame that it took such a long and sometimes tedious path to get there.

Simmons' best.
A delightful book, made so by the voice of the narrator, Wilkie Collins. I will leave the details of the plot and it's historical basis to other reviewers. The humor, surprise, and dread of which this book is brimming all come from Dan Simmons' creation of the drug addicted, envious, murdering, completely self absorbed Collins. Simmons has worked the same magic that Nabakov (I am not comparing their stature as writers) did in Lolita, taking despicable feelings and acts and by inverting them make them entertaining.
To me he carries it off flawlessly, keeping a steady forceful momentum from beginning to end.