andrepedra1

Every time someone asked me what I was reading, I held up this massive tome and said, "It's about the search for the Northwest Passage. And a MONSTER!" The looks I got in return were priceless. This book is not a horror novel. Is it scary? Yes. But the things that are scary about it are the real things - starving to death, dying of scurvy, cannibalism. The monster stalking them on the ice? Big and gross, malevolent and hulking, but I read great amounts of this book at night and was never once scared of it. The things that made me tense were the isolation, the hopelessness of the sailors' situation. If the Terror was going to kill them, it was going to kill them. Aside from that, which is much more an issue I have with the marketing of the book than the book itself, I thought this was excellent. I've read a bit - not as much as I would like - about the Franklin expedition, and really enjoyed the small details. My favorite was probably Blankey's promise to himself that he was finally going to read The Vicar of Wakefield. This is the one book (aside from Bibles) that later search parties discovered when they looked for the lost explorers. I can't swear to it, but I'd bet that the bulk of the small details Simmons dropped in about what people carried with them, etc. comes from similar sources (there were, after all, a lot of search parties over the years after the Franklin expedition, both in the immediate years following and much later, with an archaeological bent). Anyway. Did this book need to be 800 pages long? Probably not. If someone had cut out about half of the it-was-cold-and-scurvy-is-gross discussion, it would be significantly shorter. But I didn't mind the length, and it-was-cold-and-scurvy-is-gross is kind of the point of the book, isn't it? And a MONSTER!

2020-09-16 11:18