The Terror (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

The Terror, by Dan Simmons (Back Bay Books 2007). This is another from the Entertainment Weekly list of the best books of 2007. I liked the one I picked up from that list, And Then We Came to the End, but I couldn’t finish this one, which is very unusual for me. I thought the premise sounded interesting: in the 1840s, two British ships set out to try to find a Northwest Passage around Canada. They are prepared to get completely iced in for a winter, which they are, but then they are trapped by an unusually cold summer, and when the book opens they are again stuck in the ice and beginning their second long, dark winter. A silent Eskimo woman with no tongue has attached herself to them. And then, out of nowhere, an unseen killer with seemingly supernatural powers--like the alien from Alien, sort of--starts killing the men off. It was just too hokey for me; I quit after about 70 pages, skipped to the end and read it, and didn’t feel like I had missed anything. Indeed, because the book is 760+ pages long, I was very pleased with my decision.