Author: Dan Simmons
Genre: Thriller, Historical, Suspense
Rating: 9/10
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 ofLondon 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.
This
was a pretty brilliant book in two ways. First the combination of fact
and fiction told from the point of view of a very real writer from the
nineteenth century through his supposedly real experiences and life with
Charles Dickens interspersed with his opium induced fantasies. You
don't really know which is which until the end of the book. Telling the
story of the last five years of Charles Dickens' life and the bizarre
circumstances of the train accident that killed everyone but Dickens and
his mistress and how that shaped his remaining years...as well as the
story of the ghoulish spectre called Drood that loomed over those
remaining five years. The other cool thing is that the book is about
800 pages, but it is quick to get into and a hard to put down one, at
that. It is moody and dark and really seems to capture the filth and
despair of nineteenth century Whitechapel London that can only be
described as Dickensian. I highly recommend this one
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