Product Description

Sealed for 125 years, a secret manuscript by Charles Dickens' friend and some-time collaborator Wilkie Collins, reveals the dark secret that obsessed both men - a secret that not only ended their long friendship, but also brought each writer to the very brink of murder. 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 - hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever. His train jumped the rail and plummeted into the marsh below. Dickens assisted the maimed and dying but the experience shook him to the core.His personality visibly darkened, his famous public readings began to focus on the most violent scenes he'd ever written, especially the terrible murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. The author acted out the murder, adding dialogue and gesture, screaming, begging, strangling and cutting. By night Dickens and Collins began stalking the underbelly of London, obsessed with corpses, catacombs, murders, lime pits, opium dens, disguises and serial killers. Research - or something darker? Or perhaps Wilkie Collins - a laudanum addict with a seething, Salieri-esque jealousy of Dickens' success - had another agenda?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106361 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Drood is something of a change of pace for the talented American writer Dan Simmons, who made his mark with highly ambitious, sprawling futuristic epics such as Hyperion, (which won the prestigious Hugo award) and The Fall of Hyperion, creating -- with tremendous panache and invention -- alternate worlds and societies. Here, however, is Simmons’s take on 19th Britain and two of its greatest creative artists: the writers Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins (the title, of course, is a reference to Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Dan Simmons’ Drood, however, is a very different literary endeavour, with the two writers plunged into a darkly atmospheric Victorian world where supernatural creatures haunt the shadows (and, beneath the streets, an alternative cityscape exists).

All of this is handled with the energy we have come to expect from Dan Simmons, and along with his eventful narrative, he is able to take on notions of creativity and the gulf between genius and talent (Dickens and Wilkie Collins are pungently characterised). Perhaps those more used to the intergalactic reach of Simmons’ earlier work may need to adjust (and an interest in Dickens, Collins and in the 19th century classics is definitely an advantage), but for those persuaded to join Simmons and his two protagonists on their sinister and terrifying odyssey (a rather long one, it should be noted – the book is nearly 800 pages), this is a journey they will not regret undertaking. Simmons’s early work utilised elements from the horror genre (a constant here) – and horror reappears frequently in Dickens’ world, making this a strong literary marriage. --Barry Forshaw

Review
'I am in awe of Dan Simmons' Stephen King. 'Peopled by characters worthy of Dickens novel... a fascinating book that adds to the speculative writings about the Victorian author's last and unfinished work. A must-read for all Dickens and Wilkie Collins admirers' Daily Mail.

About the Author
Dan Simmons is an outstanding commercial talent. He has won the Hugo award, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus award (three times) and the Bram Stoker award. He lives in Colorado.

Customer Reviews

Yet another pastiche...
Marginally better than The Last Dickens, this contains the funniest solecism I've come across recently: 'goose' shooting for 'grouse' shooting. It took me several minutes to realise that Dan Simmons hadn't heard of grouse and thought that goose would do. I don't know why publishers assume that we will tolerate Americans pretending to write English as if they were Victorians and doing it so badly. There are bits of good Wilkie Collins and even Dickens in this novel but they are all plagiarised from letters, memoirs and novels which are now out of copyright. There is almost no 'story' because there are hardly any developed characters, other than 'Dickens' and 'Collins', and considering the number of pages I've ploughed through that's quite a feat and totally un-Dickensian. The apparent 'plot' is simply nonsense. The research is poor and only in that marginally better than The Last Dickens which is just fanciful and full of errors of fact. Please, please learn the English for 'drapes' (curtains), 'sidewalk' (pavement - but he gets it right when he's copying), 'rubbers' (galoshes), 'gotten' (got, or obtained, but NEVER used in English) and the rest. Poor stuff.

So much promise, so little reward.
From the outset, Drood promises much. The engaging premise is that this is a book written by the author Wilkie Collins, about the last years of Charles Dickens' life, and his entanglement with a sinister character named Drood amid the crypts and opium dens of Victorian London. Certainly the novel starts out well, with a trully horrific recreation of the Staplehurst crash in which Dickens was caught up in 1865. It is at the scene of the crash that Dickens meets Drood, a macabre cloaked ghoul who begins to haunt both Dickens and Collins. From this explosive opening however, the book goes downhill badly.

Firstly the book is excessively long. The first four-hundred pages only occasionaly venture into the realm of advancing the plot, meaning that when the action finally does properly begin, the book is half finished.

Instead of plot and action the reader is treated to a seemingly endless anecdotes and facts about the lives of Dickens and Collins, which, while interesting, have nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Whole chapters are basically biographical information on Dickens written from Collins' point of view and are wholly irrelevant.

It is clear the author did a lot of research on the characters and the period, and while that is laudible, Simmons seems determined to ram this information down our throats, meaning that characterss constantly say things like; "... 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." This kind of clumsy attempt to introduce facts about the authors into casual conversation drags the book down and creates characters who barely sound human.

One of the major problems with the book is that the two central characters seem to drift in a vacuum, surrounded by a cast of cardboard cut-outs. None of the characters in the novel outside of Dickens and Collins are fleshed out in any way. Thus while the author goes to great lengths to describe underground caverns and give exact (and exacting) information about London's sewers, the children, lovers, friends and enemies of Dickens and Collins remain little more than shadowy puppets, drifting in and out of scenes with no purpose.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book is that there is in fact a good story hidden underneath all this dross. The problem is that it is simply not worth trawling through nearly 800 pages of a book to find it.

Drood: beyond Genius lies boredom!
Whenever i find myself mentioning Dan Simmons to someone who hasn't come across his books i always praise two things: his grasp of story and his ability to turn this skill to any genre. "Summer of Night" is a masterful horror tale, in many ways better than Stephen King's IT that is is often unfairly compared to. Hyperion is simply the best sci-fi i have ever read and "The Terror" was a brilliant melding of historical fiction and overt thriller.

However, it is this latter that Simmons tries to repeat with "Drood" and sadly he fails appallingly in my opinion. I have read Dicken's and Wilkie Collin's both academically and for pleasure and i was massively looking forward to the story once i saw it's synopsis. Sadly i found it to be an extremely tedious and uneven mixing of miniscule historical detail and ridiculous sensationalism. Simmons has clearly done an awful lot of research for the novel and my god does he want the reader to know about it. I'm all for inclusion of reality and anecdote but most of the time "Drood" reads like a dry-as-dust textbook. Andrew Sanders' biography of Dickens, despite it's non fiction status, is twice as involving and at least we can be sure of its accuracy.

The character's of Wilkie Collins and Dickens are the only two that the reader is ever invited to know. Everyone else orbits the pair without being suitably fleshed out. Most often they seem included merely to display the extent of Simmons' knowledge of Dickens's social circle. And the inclusion of Drood himself is so ludicrous that it almost seems to belong to another novel. It is obvious that the contrast betweent the dry factual passages and the sensational chapters involving Drood and the subtteranean London landscape serve to emphasise the two speheres of Dickens's existence. Unfortunately they are so poorly melded (unlike in "The Terror" where Simmons excels) that they jar and each makes the other seem ridiculous.

In short, if you want to know about the lives of these high victorian gentlemen, then the most worthwhile part of "Drood" is the bibliography of sources. If, on the other hand, you desire a great historical adventure story then read "The Terror" or indeed, Dickens himself.