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Solidly in genre

Posted on April 26, 2007April 26, 2007 by Staff

By Erica Eisdorfer

I work with lots of college students and try to pay attention to their interests and tastes.

Recently, one of them put a book directly into my hands. “Read this,” he said seriously. “Just read it and tell me what you think.” Generally a jovial youth, quick to laugh, his demeanor, as he offered up the book, was serious and slightly awed. I took the book home.

The novel, The Terror, by Dan Simmons, the Hugo-Award winning author of the Hyperion
Cantos, is massive, which I like. I just happen to like a sustained narrative. Also, it’s set in the cold cold north (the Arctic Circle), which appeals to me. (I loved Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, another Arctic book, so much that I actually wrote her a fan letter.)

The characters are finely drawn – flawed, complicated, interesting – and they’re imbued with that slightly depressed tone that I just can’t get enough of. It’s no wonder they’re depressed. They’ve been stuck in glacial pack ice for a couple of years when the book opens.

Simmons’s information is deep: Ask him anything about the English Navy or Marines in the years between 1823 and 1850. Go ahead. Ask him.

I’m not saying I didn’t read until 2:00 a.m. for about five nights in a row, because I did. I couldn’t put the thing down (despite its extraneous 200 pages (apparently Mr. Simmons is important and/or scary enough that his editors are afraid to do their jobs). I’m not saying that I didn’t largely enjoy it. I’m not not recommending it. All I’m saying is this: Why did Mr. Simmons feel that the addition of a boogie-monster was necessary when he already had about 700 pages of scurvy, cannibalism, snow-blindness, gangrene, starvation, Inuit vs. British explorer conflict and a whole bunch of rats? To me, what’s real is a whole lot scarier than what isn’t, any day of the week.

In the end, you can’t quibble with taste. Lots of people like horror. There’s an author named Stephen King who’s made a good living from it. But if you think about Frankenstein and why it was horrible, you’ll realize it was the inner lives – of the monster, as well as of the good doctor – that made it so. And that’s what boosts a book out of genre and into literature. As it is, The Terror is a horror story, albeit a really good one.

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