Ok, I started writing a witty review of The Terror by Dan Simmons, but then I read the excellent reviews on Amazon for it and decided my review sucked. So, here’s the short version.
This is very intense, detailed, and fascinating book. It is sometimes painful to read, even horrific, but it drew me back in over and over for the 766 pages. Strikingly original and powerful, it is a book that I will not forget.
I have a signed first edition hardcover of Mr Simmon’s Olympos from a signing at Book People in Austin, and he is an author that I consistently enjoy.
This book paints a typical Simmons large canvas, albeit in a physically tiny, cramped environment. The scope comes from the ensemble cast of the crew members. The crew are so tightly packed into each others lives for the duration of the voyage that they seem to become a single entity. Simmons writes chapters from the viewpoints of many of the different crew members, as if hte crew were a single person that expresses itself in a myriad of ways. As the crew members die, the extraneous emotions of this hypothetical multi-person are pared away – hope, dignity, stupidity and innocence are shaved off until just the core emotions remain in the form of the most basic and stubborn human motivations.
Bravo.
