Ice, ice, baby

THE TERROR

By DAN SIMMONS

Back Bay Books, 766 pages

Available at Power Books

As one gets older, kicks get harder to find. People’s jaded palates shift from tutti-frutti ice cream to the more exotic durian. This perhaps explains why noted sci-fi and horror writer Dan Simmons set aside telling sci-fi and ghost stories back in 2007 and took on writing an ambitious historical novel about a doomed English expedition through the Northwest Passage near the arctic circle — complete with an unfathomable white monster that dines on English seamen.

The Terror is a great Halloween read in ways that would never be found in Dan Brown’s dictionary: one savors the historical detail of the two explorer vessels — the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — as they steam forward through seasonal ice floes in 1845, only to be stopped by glaciers and a particularly nasty spectral beast that occupies the frozen wastes outside their stranded ships. One enjoys the leisurely character development as it unfolds through multiple narratives — such as that of Captain Sir John Franklin, commander of the Erebus, said to have eaten his own boot leather on a previous failed expedition rather than resort to the unspeakable indignities of cannibalism. Or Captain James Crozier, the hard-drinking Irish commander of The Terror, who seems to think the white creature out there is prowling the ice caps specifically for him.

Put another way, you read Dan Brown books the way you whip through Cliff Notes: looking for key words and bullet points to cut down on your reading time. Savoring is out of the question with Brown: his goal is to slide you through the text as effortlessly as possible, like crap through a goose.

Simmons, who started out in the potboiler horror genre but has matured considerably as a writer (even Stephen King finds The Terror a “remarkable” read, and probably wishes he could write like this), hasn’t dropped some of his old habits: we still have what amounts to a monster story set in the arctic wastes. But it’s the accumulated naturalistic detail of this doomed expedition that will leave readers hanging on every chapter. Like recovered notebooks from the Donner Pass expedition — in which early American settlers were trapped in the Southwest mountains, then forced into cannibalism — we get epistolary chapters from the ship’s remaining physician (Dr. Harry D.H.S. Goodsir, who emerges from his civilian timidity to become a determined survivor), interspersed with selections from a timeline that moves back and forth, filling in the gaps with careful exposition along the way. Instead of tracking the action in third person, Simmons has our hapless sailors recount the horrors experienced out on the ice. Thus The Terror has the feel of recorded history, or cautionary tale.

How scary is our monster here? Well, description defies many of the characters, and there’s a reason for that. But it’s better to explore that mystery yourself.

Adapting the shape and form of genre fiction, Simmons is free to explore class differences — such as the officers’ quarters, stacked with whiskey, wine, frills and expensive books versus the seaman’s quarters, located next to an ice locker, crawling with rats, that has become a storage area for dead sailors — those dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled by a 20-foot creature that seems beyond evil, somehow. Something simply otherworldly. 

The opening in the ice was some ten yards or less to his left. The ice was high enough above the black water here that Sir John could raise his head, set the top of his bald and freezing pate against rough ice, gasp in air, blink water and blood out of his eyes, and actually see the glow of the Saviour’s light not ten yard away…

Something huge and wet rose between him and the light. The darkness was absolute. His inches of breathable air were suddenly taken away, filled with the rankest of carrion breath against his face.

“Please…,” began Sir John, sputtering and coughing.

Then the moist reek enveloped him and huge teeth closed on either side of his face, crunching through bone and skull just forward of his ears on both sides of his head. 

Simmons raises the stakes with The Terror, introducing character after character to pick up the narrative thread, thus exploring the social world of 19th-century England in the process. Homosexuality, alcoholism, the Bible, the theories of Darwin, indigenous peoples, the mechanics of cutting up human bodies for consumption — all these are taken up in crisp, ice-cold detail, refracted through the distorted prism of a fear overtaking the terror of being stranded on the ice.

When a toxic contaminant ruins most of the ships’ canned food supply, starvation and scurvy are added to their concerns. Clues to the creature’s true nature are held in check by an Esquimaux woman who roams the ice floes. Known as Lady Silence by the bedraggled survivors, her tongue has been cut out: she can’t give them answers, but supplies them with the occasional hunted seal, the blubber of which the sailors desperately need to stave off scurvy.

Early on in The Terror, we glimpse the moment when all could have been saved: the point where 30-foot-deep pack ice first stalls the expedition over a brutal first winter, and the ships’ officers debate what to do next. Captain Crozier, the seasoned realist, suggests abandoning the damaged Erebus, combining their food supply on the remaining HMS Terror, and retreating to find another passage south. “Go for broke,” as one officer puts it. Captain Franklin, the man who ate his own boots, finds this preposterous. The expedition will continue, he vows. We know at this point that Franklin’s wrongheaded pride will get himself and countless other men killed, but it’s a mark of Simmons’ skill that we readers still want to know exactly and in great detail how disaster will befall each and every one of them.

And it’s also a given that Simmons’ monster will eventually pale in comparison to the monstrosities inflicted by men upon other men; and that the terror roaming the wastes is but a flickering shadow next to the terror that resides and burns inside the soul of each and every man. Oh, it’s going to make a great movie, too. But make sure you read the book first.