I just finished Drood, and it’s so good I had to say something about it. If you haven’t discovered Dan Simmons, he’s one of the most versatile writers of our day. Of the Simmons books I’ve read, this one reminds me most of The Terror. Both book’s plots cram you into a suffocating crevice of history that naturally lends itself to horror. Both stories teem with all levels of society, and make loose-and-creative use of historical personages to drive the narrative. If a novel could be compared to an island, these two Simmons novels are continents. The Terror thrusts the reader into the midst of a doomed British Artic expedition. Drood takes us farther than we can go in complete comfort into early Victorian England — the grim lives of servants, unmarried sisters, mistresses who had few rights, societies of rat-children in the sewers beneath London and all the opium kingdoms underground. In Drood, all London is menaced by a mysterious sewer-loving undead creature who goes by this name, and with Simmons’ nuanced handling it’s all highly credible. In real life, “Drood” is Dickens’ character in his final novel, left half finished at his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Here, Drood is much more.

Simmons uses pioneer mystery author Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens’ collaborator and close friend, as the point-of-view character for the story, and it’s a brave and challenging choice, as Simmons’ Wilkie Collins has such a pinched, distorted perspective of his world. That we can interpret this rich, fast-paced story at all through the cracked lens of Collins’ cluelessness, self-absorption and jealousy of Dickens — and still feel the terrible suspense — shows Simmons to be a master of characterization. Dickens is marvelous here — and thank god he is here, because he provides relief from the stifling hours you must spend inside Wilkie Collins’ head. Collins’ adventures are reliably heart-pounding, but it’s Simmons’ Charles Dickens who makes this book work for me — he’s the light of this world, dazzling man of wonders, and you want to keep watching him forever. His generosity, and general saneness, (at least compared to narrator Collins) keeps the book’s mood balanced. It was interesting, as a reader, to find myself reading between the lines whenever Collins grumbles about the shortcomings of his friends, because you learn quickly you can’t trust a word of what he says — or thinks — about other people, which added many darkly amusing notes.

Here is my greatest compliment to this book: As I tried to avoid “spoilers” in writing this, it occurred to me that you couldn’t ruin this book for anyone with a single spoiler. It’s that rich. Because the story’s tension proceeds on so many levels, the terror mounts on multiple fronts, and the characters are so complex, each with a suspenseful story of his/her own, somehow this massive book is rendered strangely spoiler-proof. The twists and turns and surprises here are epic, particularly as the book slams toward its end. This is a housebound-in-a-snowstorm book if there ever was one, but it’s more: it left me uplifted, excited about writing, and wanting to launch into a study of the era.