With his latest effort, DROOD, Dan Simmons has tackled the
two-fold task of covering two of literature’s most famous
voices: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It is ironic that his
prior novel, THE TERROR, dealt with the infamous and tragic
Franklin Expedition of 1850, which served as inspiration for
several of Dickens’s works of fiction as well as his
collaboration with Collins on the play/novel THE FROZEN DEEP. That
event changed the lives and sensibilities of 1850s London in the
same way that a terrorist attack shocks modern society. Simmons did
not follow THE TERROR with DROOD as a natural progression, as he
had planned on writing a novel about Dickens for some time.

DROOD is a fictional recreation of the final five years of
Dickens’s life. The most significant event that occurs during
this time is the Staplehurst train crash on June 9, 1865. Dickens
has been traveling with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother
when the train plunges off a cast-iron bridge that is under repair
to the gorge below. He escapes major injury, but what he
experiences afterward may have caused him irreparable psychological
damage. In scouring among the fallen railroad cars, he comes across
an eerie gentleman clad in a black top hat and cape who appears to
be moving amongst the dead and near-dead passengers in a ghoulish
manner. He approaches this individual and is met by a tall, gaunt
and frightening persona with long, straight teeth and a skeletal
grimace. The mysterious character refers to himself as Mr. Drood
and immediately begins his mesmerizing of Dickens, whereby his mere
presence haunts Dickens to his very core. Succeeding sightings of
Drood lead Dickens down a path of near-madness.

The only person with whom Dickens feels comfortable sharing his
story and fears of Drood is his protégé and fellow
author, Wilkie Collins. Collins had recently become famous in his
own right when his novel, THE WOMAN IN WHITE, was met with
overwhelming enthusiasm when introduced in serialized form in
Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine. He is in the
process of following up this success with the release of another
serialized novel, THE MOONSTONE, which has been referred to as
“the grandfather of the modern crime novel” and
features an investigator who is the precursor to literary
detectives such as Sherlock Holmes. The relationship Dickens has
with Collins at this time can almost be compared to that of Antonio
Salieri and the young genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart --- a
relationship that ended tragically.

Dickens met Collins in 1851 and took an instant liking to him.
They work together and spend holidays at each other’s homes.
The Staplehurst incident brings about the first drought period in
Dickens’s writing career, and he only completes one novel in
the final five years of his life: OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. During this
time, Collins’s career and reputation begin to take off.
Dickens still is not above suggesting changes to Collins’s
work, and DROOD has a particularly humorous scene whereby
Dickens’s creative criticism about Collins’s idea that
eventually becomes THE MOONSTONE involves a total restructuring of
the novel’s plot, characters and title.

Regardless of their changing relationship, Collins becomes
highly concerned about his mentor’s mindset following his
first meeting with Drood and asks to accompany Dickens to the
subterranean lair that houses Drood and other ghoulish characters
of the London underground. Dickens insists that he is being
mesmerized by Drood into dropping all his other work and writing
Drood’s own story. Thus, we have the supposed impetus for
Dickens’s final and unfinished work, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN
DROOD. DROOD introduces several characters whose personae are used
within the haunting THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, a novel that is
unlike anything Dickens has ever written.

Collins himself begins to obsess about the Drood character, and
it starts invading his dreams and waking thoughts. Where Dickens
battled his own addiction to opium, Collins has similar dependency
issues involving an abuse of laudanum to battle chronic pain from
his rheumatic gout. At times Collins believes that he has a
“double” that provides ideas for his stories and often
has awoken to find pages of work written in a hand unlike his own.
Collins’s own obsession causes him to seek out treatment for
his chronic pain in the very underground that houses Drood. It is
inevitable that Drood will meet up with Collins and task him to
complete the work about his life that he fears Dickens will not
live to finish himself. Collins’s behavior changes radically
as he has strong feelings of inferiority to Dickens and demands
that he be treated as his equal. He even begins to detest Dickens
and his lifestyle and secretly plots his demise in a lime pit and
hidden tomb.

Was Dickens’s own mesmeric power, which he himself
referred to as “parlor tricks,” strong enough to be
causing all of Collins’s fears and hallucinations? Collins
himself considers Dickens a “vampire who needed public
occasions and audiences from which to drain the energy he needed to
stagger on another day.” Or were Dickens and Collins both
equally mesmerized by the dark Mr. Drood into becoming his pawns
and unwilling biographers? DROOD provides thrills at every turn,
and you never quite know what is real and what is not. All that is
truly known is that Dickens did indeed die five years from the very
date of the Staplehurst train crash and his alleged first meeting
with the ghoulish Drood.

Dan Simmons noted that an author can’t win by writing
historical fiction because of all the scholars and content experts
who will scrutinize the work. However, he feels that the
opportunity to reconnect readers with classic literature is a
bonus. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD was never completed, even though
several literary scholars have attempted to forecast how the novel
would end. Wilkie Collins died in 1889 but never achieved success
at the level of his works written under the influence of his
mentor, Charles Dickens. With DROOD, Simmons has presented a
voluminous work at nearly 800 pages --- but it reads fast and
furious and never fails to engage and excite the reader with its
utterly original content. Bravo!