Matt's Reviews > The Terror

“They crossed the Great Ice Barrier separating the pack ice from land sometime after 1:00 a.m. The wind stayed low but the temperature continued to drop. During one pause to rerig ropes for the lifting of the sledges over a thirty-foot wall of ice…Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was –82 degrees. [Captain] Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours. At sunset, when he'd last looked to the south at the distant creature loping ahead of them now – it was already crossing the sea ice barrier in easy leaps – he had made the mistake of taking his mittens and gloves off for a moment so as to write some position notes in his log. He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal. In pulling his hands away quickly, he had ripped a layer of skin and some flesh off his right thumb and three fingers on one hand, and lifted a swath off his left palm…”
- Dan Simmons, The Terror


The first time I read Dan Simmons’s The Terror, it was during the worst breakup of my life. It was one of those breakups that completely re-alter your perceptions, so that all sense of balance and scope is gone. It was a breakup like the one Jack Kerouac wrote about at the beginning of On the Road, and it left me with the “feeling that everything was dead.” Fifteen years, one marriage, and four kids later, the whipsawing emotional lability I experienced as a young adult is a distant memory, barely kept alive by some truly embarrassing journal entries I really should destroy.

In any event, as I pushed through those unforgiving days, when minutes felt like hours, and each week an eternity, I sought something to take my mind off my troubles. The Terror perked my interest because it was about unimaginable suffering. In my hyperemotional state, this greatly appealed to me.

The suffering in The Terror comes from a multitude of sources. There is the cold weather, the dark nights, and a ship locked in the ice. There is poisoned food, scurvy, and potentially mutinous shipmates. Above all, casting a shapeless shadow, is a voracious, mythical-seeming creature that is tearing men apart out on the ice.

By the end, my original need had been satisfied. Love – as they say – hurts, but no more than your teeth falling from your gums, or your limbs turning black with frostbite, or some nameless land shark ripping out your intestines for no apparent purpose.

***

Despite its supernatural horror roots, The Terror is actually based upon historical events. Indeed, as far as the record exists – and to be honest, there’s not much record to speak of – it is pretty accurate.

The nonfiction baseline is John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to the Arctic Circle to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a water route that is only now being revealed by a warming earth. Franklin was a famed explorer in his day, and had survived earlier brushes with death by eating his shoes. This expedition was the first with steam-powered ships. Even with that extra oomph, however, his two vessels – the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus – got themselves stuck fast in the ice.

***

Simmons actually starts things in 1847, two years into the expedition. The opening scene hauntingly captures the beauty, wonder, and severity of the far north, with Captain Francis Crozier, the commander of HMS Terror, coming out on deck in –50 degree weather to see the Northern Lights reaching toward him.

Though being icebound is not ideal, the Expedition had been provisioned for this eventuality. Unfortunately, due to unscrupulous merchants, most of their tinned food has gone bad, a real-life theory that has both supporters and detractors in the robust literature surrounding Franklin’s mission.

The hunger and the scurvy would be bad enough, accentuated by the cold and darkness, but Simmons’s clever twist is to add another lethal variable in the guise of a murderous bear-thing.

***

One of my life principles is that history is not a spoiler. The events of the past, often involving the deaths of real people, should not be treated as though they are a last-act reveal or a narrative twist. I have learned, of course, that not everyone on the internet agrees with this premise. Accordingly, if you don’t know about the Franklin Expedition, and prefer to learn its specifics elsewhere, please skip the next two paragraphs.

For those still here, I will note that no member of the historical Franklin Expedition ever returned home. Rescue ships pieced together some of the mystery. Two different messages – both on the same piece of paper, and tucked into a rock cairn – provide tantalizing clues, but no full account. There is also some Inuit testimony of white men trying to cross the ice. This has led to a consensus that a portion of the crew tried to escape the ships and travel over-ice, pulling heavy sledges behind them. This proved incredibly difficult, as the ice was not slippery and flat, but a semi-mountainous terrain created by pack ice crashing together and forming jagged up-flows. Within the past few years, both Terror and Erebus have been found underwater, though they’ve been slow to disclose any secrets.

In any event, Simmons has chosen a marvelously spooky canvas upon which to paint his tale, cleverly interspersing the known with the unknown, the spare facts and his informed speculation, and then adding a relentless, unknowable killer to the mix.

***

Simmons tells the story in alternating third-person chapters told from the points-of-view of a handful of different characters. Chief among them is Captain Crozier, an alcoholic running out of booze, and mourning the lingering remnants of a failed romance. Other chapters center on overall expedition leader Sir John Franklin himself, shipmates Blanky and Peglar, and Dr. Goodsir, whose chapters mainly consist of journal excerpts, which give Simmons the opportunity to unload historical information without trying to interweave it into the main storylines. In a bit of tongue-in-cheek verisimilitude, each chapter heading includes the latitude, longitude, and date.

This is not really a character study. Aside from Crozier, none of the crew leaps out as a great literary creation. For the most part, they are sturdy archetypes, which frankly works just fine. The addition of Silence, an Inuit woman without a tongue, is a bit more unfortunate, approaching as she does the mystical indigenous stereotype.

***

At 766 pages, this is a long, dense novel, filled with details. The plot itself is not important, save for Simmons’s ability to use it to modulate tension. Ultimately, B-story elements such as a burgeoning mutiny feel a bit like filler, but they serve the purpose of marking time till the freaky-scary thing out on the ice attacks again.

And boy, does Simmons nail those scenes. There is some truly taut moments of waiting, thrilling chases through the odd moonscapes of the ice, and brutal collisions of man and teeth.

At times, The Terror can be exhausting, repetitively hitting the same notes over and over. Perhaps that is partially the point, a way of demonstrating – in a very minor way – what it would have been like to be trapped for so long. The climax is debatable. Depending on your mood, it can be either silly or disappointing or creepy or provoking. I’m not sure I liked it, but I didn’t forget it, because it is a bit bonkers.

***

We are in a spot right now, and not a good one. There is a pandemic that keeps flaring, even though we are trying to pretend it’s over. The actual temperature of the United States is rising, while the figurative temperatures of the body politic are past boiling. The economy looks ready to collapse, along with democracy, and if you are thinking of escaping, you should avoid Eastern Europe, because there’s a war.

In trying moments, it is nice to plunge into a book that takes you away from your troubles. A book where everyone is good looking, the income is disposable, and every problem can be solved by the time the sun sets on the beach.

Or you can read The Terror and simply embrace the suck.