aPriL does feral sometimes 's Reviews > The Terror

‘The Terror’can be shelved under several genres: historical fiction, horror, adventure. Wherever it is shelved, it is a fantastic read. However, it is long, with horrifying and graphic descriptions of illnesses, injuries and violent attacks. Since it is a fictionalized story about people who really existed (it is based on a real English explorer, Captain Franklin, and his last voyage to the Arctic), it has a lot of interesting details about what it was like to be a ship-based explorer in the mid-1800's from actual diaries and stories.

‘The Terror' never falls apart in its story of relentless frights, but you as the reader might if you tend to empathize with its likable characters.

I loved the book. I think it was very meta, so most things in it were both symbolic as well as describing actual physical objects and scenes. (view spoiler)[I think the monster, for instance, was both an actual mythic monster and a symbol of the brutality of nature. (hide spoiler)]

A book this relentlessly awful and depressing HAD to have a Hollywood ending for me, otherwise I would have felt too horrified by it to like it. I'm glad for my sake it wasn't more sad than it is. I realize that the real life explorers very likely died horribly of starvation, and accident, and scurvy, but 900+ pages of fictional death death death death would have been too much for me eventually to finish. There is some closure (I know that word is overused, but it fits) at the end.

(view spoiler)[The character Hickey goes on my list of one of the most horrifying fictional evil bad guys ever, alongside Hannibal the Cannibal. But unlike some readers whose reviews I have read on GR, I did not see any homosexuality presented as an evil. Hickey was simply an evil man, full stop. Hickey’s homosexual behavior, in my opinion, was a means to hook him up with Magnus, otherwise it would have been harder to set up the relationship. Hickey committed an evil in using Magnus as an assassin when Magnus had a child-like mentality and obviously could not understand fully why he was being ordered to kill people. Hickey also took advantage of Magnus's very innocent love, too. Hickey was a person who could manipulate others into evil acts without caring whether people trusted or loved him. He only cared about having power over people. Hickey didn't give a damn who he destroyed.

Frankly, I thought the author was presenting homosexuality as a simple fact of life, in itself something not fraught with any moral presumptions at all. I thought the takeaway was a demonstration of how evil Hickey was in faking empathy and love, not in how homosexual he was, gentle reader. Obviously, I disagree with some reviews on this issue. Besides, there is another homosexual relationship among the sailors which is very natural and emotionally normal. (hide spoiler)]

Since the subject of cannibalism is explored in the novel, I thought about what I'd do. If I'm in my full senses, I could NEVER keep such meat down. But if I was feverish and half insane with scurvy and food poisoning and exhaustion? Walking for ten hours hauling fully loaded sleds in -60 F temperatures and doing it on two moldy biscuits and a slice of salted beef a day, with my skin and body rotting while I lived? I don't know. Perhaps, gentle reader, you must never test me...

Sounds of arctic ice: https://youtu.be/vjtX4GJPFRc

Youtube link to a history about the real Franklin expedition: https://youtu.be/7-c2EFFGBww

Youtube link to an AMC series trailer about a series based on this book: https://youtu.be/OPuYei9cbaw