35. "Drood" by Dan Simmons

After spending several days with the lengthy Drood by Dan Simmons, I'm still not sure what to say about it. Narrated by William Wilkie Collins, the book follows the adventures and misadventures of his "frenemy" (to use an anachronistic but fitting term), the aging Charles Dickens. After he nearly dies in a railway crash, Dickens tells Collins about his encounter with the strange and sinister Drood, a figure that continues to obsess and haunt him--or at least this is what Collins believes. And Drood himself becomes the muse or motive or mystery behind Dickens' final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Simmons' Collins comes across as a bitter, vindictive, arbitrarily cruel man. I haven't read any biographies or contemporary accounts of him, so I don't know whether this is an accurate portrayal or not. However, I very much enjoyed his novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White, while I find Dickens virtually unreadable. (Is it heresy for an English major to say this? I no longer care.) Dickens, though, fares no better in the novel, emerging as a narcissistic, controlling figure who insists that his "friends" refer to him as "The Inimitable."

The portrayals of both men intrigued me enough that I'm adding biographies of them to my Wish List, and I downloaded a couple more Collins novels for my new Kindle (a Christmas present from my parents).

Does that make Simmons' book a success? I'm not sure. There are definitely suspenseful, dark, creepy aspects that make for satisfying reading. But, as in some of his other lengthy works (and many of Stephen King's, as well), I get the sense that Simmons wrote himself into a corner and wasn't sure how to extricate the plot. The ending seems rushed, abrupt, and anticlimactic; the novel builds and builds toward what should be an intense climax but doesn't quite deliver.

That said, not every writer can take two disagreeable, arrogant, nasty, manipulative characters and make them compelling enough that I'm willing to turn almost 800 pages to learn their fates. Simmons certainly deserves props for doing that, and doing it very well.