Drood
Dan Simmons
Trade Paperback: 800 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Reprint edition (February 8, 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0316007030
Absolutely brilliant!
Dan Simmons weaves a hell of a story with a stunningly written “Drood.” Starring Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and the mysterious Edwin Drood (among other real and fictional Victorian characters) the story explores the labyrinth of the London Underworld, the friendship and collaboration of two well-known and gifted writers, the unfinished last work of Charles Dickens (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”), and a purely fictional story of murder, mayhem, and misogyny.
Impeccably researched and filled with fast-paced prose I honestly felt like I was transported to Victorian England as I waited for the serialization of the next Dickens’s or Collins’s novel to appear on the newsstands. When Simmons walks us through the dark passages that conceal the underground cemeteries, opium dens, and catacombs of London we follow along. When he reports the train wreck at Staplehurst we experience the loss of life and limb on a personal level and we feel the victim’s pain. When he depicts the lives of the novelists we gain a sense of what life must have been like in their households.
I thoroughly enjoyed this fast-paced, page-turning phenomenon. You should too!
5 out of 5 stars
Related websites:
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” Wikipedia Entry
Complete (and searchable) text of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”
Wilkie Collins Wikipedia Entry
Wilkie Collins website
Charles Dickens – Gad’s Hill Place
Charles Dickens Wikipedia Entry
P.S. There are literally thousands of websites about Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. A Google search will give you more than you could possibly read in a lifetime. Hopefully, my few listed sites are enough to satisfy your literary needs.
Happy reading!!
The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin
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