"The Terror" | A bone-chilling account of an ill-fated voyage

"The Terror"
by Dan Simmons
Little, Brown, 769 pp., $25.99

Dan Simmons' new novel, "The Terror," may be the best thing he's ever written: a deeply absorbing story that combines awe-inspiring myth, grinding horror and historically accurate adventure.

But it may have been a mistake to begin reading it in the aftermath of Seattle's worst snowstorm in a decade.

As I was drawn into his fictional version of the Franklin Expedition's tragic efforts to discover the nonexistent Northwest Passage, I felt exposed to even colder weather than we already had endured here. And Simmons, a Hugo and Bram Stoker award winner, provides grim details of the suffering and deprivation the crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror most likely experienced during the long months they spent frozen in Arctic pack ice, from September 1845 to April 1848.

These included scurvy attacks that left skins and scalps bleeding to the touch, amputations sans anesthetics due to frostbite and weeks spent in total darkness. No surviving crew members were ever found, and the expedition's fate became an obsession of the Victorian age.

Many of the hardships the historical Franklin Expedition faced were due to human error. Simmons unflinchingly portrays the arrogance of the expedition's planners and leaders as the options of ship commanders Sir John Franklin and Captain Francis Crozier keep narrowing inexorably like rapidly closing "leads" — the open stretches of water that, in the Canadian Arctic, treacherously freeze shut without warning. The author also shows the folly and indomitable bravery of stranded sailors hauling hundreds of pounds of equipment across the jumbled white nightmare of the polar icescape.

But Simmons' skill goes beyond making readers feel his characters' pain and accept their heroic fortitude. He introduces into this harsh, beautiful milieu a monster born of the elements, yet more cunning than any natural creature. With "black claws the length of Bowie knives" and huge teeth that bite straight through skull and bone, the monster makes short work of anyone it chooses to kill. It eludes all the traps they set for it and creates eerie tableaux using human corpses.

Some of the expedition's religious-minded crew members think this 14-foot-tall man-eater may be the Devil incarnate. Crozier, a rationalist, has his doubts. When pressed to give a shipboard sermon, he reads from Thomas Hobbes' social critique "Leviathan" (the book, which he passes off as coming from the Bible, becomes one of the crew's favorite texts). The scholarly "sodomite" sailor Bridgens posits an antediluvian origin for the beast; Lady Silence, the mutilated "Esquimaux" woman who graces their miserable, foul-smelling living quarters for a time, has another theory.

Simmons' reputation isn't the hottest when it comes to sexual politics, yet his narratives from the points of view of Bridgens and his homosexual lover Peglar are as evenhanded as those he writes for any men on the ship. There's one genuine villain, also gay, but not stereotypically so. And through Lady Silence, the author introduces Inuit technology, cosmology, philosophy and other cultural riches belonging to those whose territory the expedition invaded.

Told from multiple perspectives, "The Terror" answers many questions arising from the loss of the historical Franklin Expedition, inventing satisfactory explanations of its fate where the real details long ago were lost to history. It examines other questions along the way: the nature of evil and how to confront it; the nature of courage and how to find it.