I recently read Shogun by James Clavell.  Seeing the Japanese’ reaction to the unwashed Europeans, my first thought, before I’d picked up The Terror to re-read, was how Lady Silence must think those ships stank.  The cultural differences, her one layer of fur to the Englishmen’s fifty ineffective, damp layers of cotton and wool, made me think of Shogun some more.  I liked Shogun, but if Blackthorne had battled an inhuman monster, it would have been just a snippet more awesome.

            The thing I love Dan Simmon’s The Terror is that it’s thoroughly researched (as well as I can tell from my limited Wikipedia research).  This really happened, more or less, and Simmons tossed in a sprinkle of monster. 

The scene with the Carnivale is over the top, I think, too much.  From the beginning I knew precisely what would happen—that their revelry would turn into a bloodbath, and if I had been surprised it would have pleased me more.  The book flops into a surreal nightmare, starting when Crozier notices that he and the rest of the men are drunk (“how had they done that?” he wonders, their drunkenness is a mystery which adds to the surrealism), the bear meat (or is it bear meat?) is delicious this time around, the music player sounds like real music and not the organ grinder’s instrument.  The bear costume is too real, the decapitated likeness of Sir John Franklin is too soon.  Crozier and Fitzjames are aware of a wrongness before the rest of the men, and must struggle to regain control of the bacchanal.  The black room, the clock striking midnight…then men falling silent, and screams.  I liked reading it, but I knew it was all coming.  Dan Simmons is an excellent writer, the images were real enough, but it seemed out of place and fantastic in this so real book.

            The futility of keeping with English custom amazes and amuses me in this book, in the beginning they still shave every day, docking one’s pay is still an incentive to behave.  At least they’ve abandoned saluting.  These customs decompose as it becomes more and more evident that they aren’t going to make it home alive.  By the end they have resorted to cannibalism.

            The middle part of the book gets a little bogged down and clunky, again this is something that one can excuse due to Simmon’s excellent writing style.  For the most part the exposition doesn’t feel clunky, it’s fascinating.  The tediousness of the book, though, echoes what the characters are experiencing.  I can’t begin to fathom years, not days, not weeks…years trapped in the ice with the same hundred or so people, no television, few books (most of these folks don’t seem to be the keen on reading types), no internet…granted we are more accustomed to constant stimuli than these sailors were, but still, the cabin fever factor alone would make it’s own horror novel.  And adding to that the cold?  I cannot fathom the temperatures they are talking about.  Some of these men have done this for years in a row.  If memory serves, Crozier had been out there for 13 years.  On somethingawful.com, a raunchy website which deals with video games and other nerd-macho foolishness, they had a contributor who worked stationed in Antarctica do an article (a rather serious one, for the website) about living there.  He talked about the constant stimulus, movies, books, internet, reliable contact with home…and still people drank entirely too much and were moody and petulant and crazy.  One has to assume that ships like Terror and Erebus were equipped in the same way: to deal with cabin fever as best as their culture knew how.  But still.  Damn.

            The Terror ranks as one of my favorite horror novels because the monster is so believable.  The scenario presented here plays on a million of our paranoias, and it works.  I like Dan Simmons, I guess I should go read Hyperion now.