cheers.

Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition ended in CANNABALISM AND DEATH. And in this new fictionalized account, things get even worse.

By Jonathan Miles
The Terror
Dan Simmons;
Little, Brown; $26

Inside every horror writer beats the heart of a brutish sadist. How else to explain an occupational fondness for creating characters just to dismember them later? Dan Simmons, the horror and sci-fi maestro behind Hyperion and A Winter Haunting, takes that sadism a dark notch further with his novel The Terror, a wicked imagining of the fate of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition to chart the Northwest Passage.

The scant clues pointing to the expedition’s real-life fate show enough suffering as is: After Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, were ice-locked, the expedition’s 129 men struggled through three or more years of cold, starvation, scurvy, the effects of lead-poisoned tinned food, and everything else the Arctic could fling at them. Some of them, historians suspect, resorted to cannibalism, but in vain. Not a man survived the ordeal.

In The Terror, however, Simmons levels one more cold horror at them: a massive, bloodthirsty yeti-like creature tracking the expedition’s every move. Polar sacrilege? Naw, just deliciously frigid fun, the warped result of combining The Worst Journey in the World with Alien. (In the Arctic, no one can hear you scream.)

Simmons’ depiction of early Arctic exploring is so dead-on that a by-the-facts account would have sated most readers. Alternating between the journals of one of the ships’ surgeons and a taut, elegant narrative, Simmons writes with the salty grace and precision of Patrick O’Brian. But in piling supernatural nightmare, layering mystery upon mystery, he has produced a turbocharged vision of polar doom. “The Devil trying to kill them up here…was not just the white-furred thing killing and eating them one by one,” he writes, “but everything here – the unrelenting cold, the squeezing ice, the electrical storms, the uncanny lack of seals and whales and birds and walruses and land animals, the endless encroachment of the pack ice…everything. The monster on the ice was just another manifestation of a Devil that wanted them dead. And that wanted them to suffer.”

Seems horrific enough to me.