The Terror by Dan Simmons - Review
The Terror by Dan Simmons Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Publication Date: January 1, 2009 (reprint) ISBN: 9780316008075 992 Pages (Mass Market Paperback) Fiction Summary (from the publisher ): The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition’s leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core. My Opinion: I thought it was entirely appropriate that while I was reading this book about two shiploads of sailors trapped in the arctic, the area in which I live was experiencing a cold snap with temperatures below freezing for much of the time. In addition to that I ran into images of polar bears multiple times while reading this book (nature shows, advertisements, online photos, my grocery store - it was uncanny). The Terror in this book is both the name of the ship and the name of a mysterious large polar-bear like animal that hunts the men of the Franklin Expedition. When I first saw that one of the ships was named The Terror I wondered who in the world would give a ship such an awful name, but it is the real name of one of the ships that was on the expedition (the other was named Erebus). To me naming a ship “The Terror” is just about as bad as calling it “Scurvy,” “Death Ship,” or “Drowning.” Ah, aren’t you happy, you’re sailing on “The Terror!” It makes me glad that airplanes aren’t named in the same manner. The polar bear that they nickname The Terror is obviously a fictitious element to the story, but it does liven it up and move the plot along, and it worked for me for the most part.
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