Reviews with content warning for Cursing - The Terror

This was thoroughly enjoyable. I really enjoyed the historical detail, although of course more info came out after this book was written, so some stuff is a little inaccurate, but that's perfectly fine too.

Overall a great story with a lot of twists and turns. I actually felt cold reading this. It's sometimes a bit of a bummer, but also I love seeing hubris take people, especially colonial era Brits.

Content Warnings

cviii's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

It's taken me several weeks to figure out how I want to review this book since my feelings on it are so mixed. This is going to be a long review, sorry.

If you're a fan of the AMC adaptation of the same name, I would not recommend reading this book. The show manages to mitigate a lot of problems with the source material and i feel like going from the show to the book might feel like a disappointing and bizarre slog by the end

Dan Simmons’ The Terror is novel with an incredible concept, a horror story set in the arctic based on the doomed Franklin expedition which disappeared in the Canadian Arctic while searching for the northwest passage in the late 1840s.

For anyone who is interested in historical Arctic explorations, this book is a treat. While it is undeniably repetitive and slow, I personally felt like this lent itself to the setting. reading over and over again about the cold and the layers of clothing being put on and taken off, descriptions of the pack ice, the men’s breath in the air, it all works for me as a reader. I felt like I really got a sense for what it must have been like to embark on these expeditions in the 1840s and earlier. Dan Simmons establishes a sense of time and place very well, forcing the reader to experience the banal monotony of those winters trapped in pack ice aboard the Terror and Erebus.

That being said, if you are not very very invested in these kinds of details, I would agree that this no doubt makes the book feel like it’s dragging on and is very repetitive. It's a writing style that doesn’t work for everyone and, even though I did like it, I would agree that this book could have benefited from some editing to trim down some of the repetitive details in areas.

There are historical inaccuracies, some of which are the result of the book being written almost a decade before the wrecks of the Erebus and Terror were discovered, as well as theories about what happened on the expedition, who was buried where, etc. changing since 2007 as new evidence and genetic testing has been done (for example, Le Visconte is described as having a gold tooth based on a skeleton with a gold tooth initially being identified as his; however, more recent genetic testing reveals the skeleton most likely belonged to someone from Scotland and is thought to be Henry Goodsir, whose family had a close relationship with a dentist).

Others more versed in this subject can no doubt point out other historical inaccuracies, but most that I noticed seemed to stem from misinterpretation of evidence that, at the time the novel was written, was either considered correct or a plausible interpretation. Other historical inaccuracies I noticed seemed to be intentional, like changing a character’s age from 26 to 62 and explaining it as a purposeful clerical error.

My issues with the book are many though and mainly stem from writing choices Simmons made

spoilers ahead!

The most glaring issue, in my opinion, is the appropriation of Netsilik and Inuit cultures and mythologies as a whole. The thing stalking the men on the ice is

a mythological creature Dan Simmons made up entirely for this story, which he calls a tuunbaq. This creation is very loosely based on the tupilaq. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to telling a made up myth that explains the origins of the tuunbaq. It also feels important to point out that the tupilaq myths that inspired Dan Simmons’ tuunbaq appear to be based on Greenlandic Inuit religion, not the tupilaq as it is understood by Inuit populations in what is now the Canadian Arctic.

On top of issues of appropriation that arise from a white author making up myths for a culture they are not a part of and historically has been and still is oppressed by a white settler population, the decision to

tie the monster on the ice to the indigenous people in the region was entirely too predictable. Dan Simmons is not even remotely subtle with the hints that the thing stalking the men of the Franklin expedition is tied to the fictional Netsilik characters introduced in the book and that these two people, Silna/Lady Silence and her father, are able to commune with and sort of control the tuunbaq. When characters in the story begin calling Lady Silence a witch and claiming she could control the creature, I thought it was meant to be a demonstration of racism from the British sailors that would be subverted later (because it just felt too predictable that the mysterious indigenous girl with her tongue cut out was a witch who controlled the tuunbaq)

Unfortunately, that was more or less exactly what was happening. Lady Silence was a shaman tasked with controlling or, at least, communicating and appeasing, to some extent, the tuunbaq. She isn’t a malicious witch, just a scared teenage girl unprepared to take on the responsibility of shepherding the tuunbaq.

For me, the mystical spiritual indigenous person trope is so tired, and the fact that the tuunbaq was actually made up for this novel just made it that much worse. It was predictable writing that drew on a racist trope and cultural appropriation, resulting in a very unsatisfying reveal when all the racist fear mongering from the characters turns out to be exactly what’s going on.

The other glaring issue, for me, was that Dan Simmons seemed to adopt the sensibilities of the Victorians when writing, most obviously seen in how queer characters are handled by the narrative. I have no issue with characters themselves expressing homophobic beliefs - these are undoubtedly reflective of real attitudes that existed toward queer people and queer men specifically during the Victorian era. For me, the problem was how these attitudes infused Dan Simmon’s writing outside the characters’ feelings and beliefs.

It’s established fairly early on that, while homosexuality is frowned upon amongst sailors, it’s tolerated if the men only act on their attraction toward other men while on land. Men who have sex with other men while at sea are evil or immoral in some way, with the implication being that they would target cabin boys and younger men who were vulnerable and easy to manipulate. Again, it makes sense for the characters to express these views. What doesn’t make sense, in my opinion, is to have the four queer men in the novel fall into either of those two categories.

Two of the men, Harry Peglar and John Bridgens, are former lovers who only had a physical and romantic relationship while on land, despite being at sea together numerous times for many years at a time. Peglar specifically describes Bridgens as being morally upstanding because he never pursued other men while at sea, while at the same time espousing his dislike for queer men who “prey” on other men at sea. Internalised homophobia existed in the 1840s obviously and I don’t exactly have a problem with Peglar buying into this idea that his own attraction to men is only permissible while he’s on land, but it would have been nice to see him question this idea, or to have Bridgens question it. Instead, they’re “The Good Ones” in the novel, in contrast to the other two queer men, and I find it strange that neither of them questioned this idea that having a relationship with another man is somehow immoral at sea, even if the other man is a consenting adult.

Frustratingly, because of these beliefs, these two Good Ones are explicitly not in a relationship in the novel, even after the crew has abandoned the ships and their situation devolves to the point where it seems strange to abide by these rules about when it is and is not okay to be attracted to men. Their relationship is chaste and largely platonic with hints of lingering romantic interest, falling into the all too familiar trope of sanitised queer relationships. The “Good Ones” are the gay men who don’t make the straight audience think about the physical aspects of their relationship, the ones that don’t express affection in the way straight couples are permitted to.

At the same time, the other two queer men,

Cornelius Hickey and Magnus Mason,

are evil -

Hickey in particular. Hickey is the novel’s human antagonist and is absurdly, almost comically evil.

Using the Victorian framing of queer sailors, we know

Hickey

is Immoral because our first proper introduction to him is a lieutenant walking in on him and

Mason

having sex on one of the lower decks, committing the unforgivable sin of being gay on a ship lol. Complicating this is the fact that

Mason

has already been established as possibly having an intellectual disability of some sort, implying that he probably can’t give informed consent to having sex with

Hickey

and is being taken advantage of. And, of course, it’s later shown through chapters from

Hickey’s

point of view that he’s at least in part using

Mason

due to his stature and strength so he can

pull off a successful mutiny later.

I don’t think it was intentional on Dan Simmons’ part, but writing these four queer men this way plays exactly into the existing homophobia of the Victorian era which continues to inform present day homophobia. The “Good Ones” are queer men who keep their sexuality behind closed doors while the bad queer men don’t, and on top of that they prey young and/or vulnerable men. It’s unfortunate that Simmons either didn’t see that this is what he was doing, or possibly even agreed with the sentiment to some extent.

Hickey

in general is a truly awful antagonist. As I already mentioned, he’s comically evil, even from the very early chapters. He has no likable qualities and resolves early on to

Lieutenant Irving,

who walked in on him and

Mason

having sex, to ensure

Irving

won’t report what he saw to Captain Crozier. And this motivation continues throughout the book that takes place over two years, despite

Irving

never reporting what he saw to Crozier during that time. Characters can, of course, have ridiculous motivations but at some point it starts to feel unbelievable and more of a risk to

kill Irving

than to leave him alone, since

killing him risks Hickey getting caught and then having to explain why he wanted to kill the lieutenant.

Hickey's

motivations are kind of unclear throughout the novel, he seems to be terrible just for the sake of it, and none of the other characters like him, making the support of

his eventual mutiny

by other characters somewhat unbelievable.

The mutiny comes when the situation for the crews of the Erebus and Terror is truly dire but the fact that so many characters hated Hickey made it feel strange when they suddenly decided to abandon their captain to go with him.

Had

Hickey

been a more fleshed out character, maybe a bit less obviously evil and a bit more cunning and manipulative and even likable, it would have felt a bit more realistic.

Adding more depth to the character might also have helped to give him some motivation beyond just being an evil gay implied paedophile.. By the end of the book he’s randomly developed a god complex and is delusional. Again, this could have worked, if it was built up slowly and we understood

Hickey

as a character, if there was something in his past that shaped him into becoming the person he ends the book as. But there’s nothing. He's a boring antagonist

and, like the tuunbaq,

Dan Simmons is not subtle at hinting that he’s going to be the villain. there’s no attempts at subversion, no moment where the reader can wonder if

Hickey

might be more than what he appears to be. what you see is exactly what you get

(also worth noting is that Cornelius Hickey was a real person, a 24 year old young man from Ireland who was a caulker’s mate on the expedition. Unlike Captain Crozier, Sir John Franklin, and Commander Fitzjames, we know almost nothing about him. Why Dan Simmons decided to turn this real, relatively unknown man into a villain is not something I really understand and I think was a questionable decision to make when deciding on an antagonist. Any of the well known naval officers, who are remembered as heroes and have biographies and monuments and statues, would have made much better antagonists for this novel.)

Hickey's

evil motivations for cannibalism brings me to my larger critique; Dan Simmons had the opportunity to truly explore the levels of desperation that would push people to the extremes that the Franklin expedition went to in order to survive. Cannibalism is part of both the fictional novel and the historical expedition. But, much like the British Victorians of the early 1850s when a report from John Rae established that the men had most likely resorted to cannibalism to avoid starving on their march south, Dan Simmons cannot accept the possibility that these Good British Men would ever do such a thing.

The thing is though, they did. Dan Simmons explains the cannibalism of the expedition as being encouraged by the comic book supervillain

Hickey. It's Hickey, who is evil for no discernible reason, who influences the men with him to resort to cannibalism.

It’s not portrayed as an act of desperation, but the act of an evil man who likes to do evil things. The good British men

who stayed with Crozier

don’t cannibalise each other until much, much later and they only cannibalise those who have already died.

Hickey,

on the other hand, kills men

in his splinter group

specifically to eat them and to feed other men.

In a story looking at people pushed to the very brink of survival, I was really hoping for a more sophisticated exploration of the lengths these men would go to to survive. The most horrific part of the cannibalism by the crew is that they were regular men, presumably going against their own morals and having to eat their friends and companions for the last three to four years in order to survive. Personally, I find that a lot more horrifying than an Evil Man who doesn’t seem to value human life killing people just to cannibalise them. That's horrific in its own way, but not in a way that makes me wonder what I would do in the same extreme situation, which is far more chilling to think about. For Dan Simmons, cannibalism is a thing that Evil People do, and good people eventually do but off page and without any real exploration of their experiences or reasoning or any kind of insight to what that decision must have been like. And that’s just kind of a let down, in my opinion, for a book purporting to be a horror story.

There’s undoubtedly a lot more to criticise about the novel, the decision to make the Irish character an alcoholic while being acutely aware of and wanting to comment on the stereotypes and oppression the Irish experienced during this time, the only indigenous character in the story being incapable of speaking or communicating for the vast majority of the book, the sexualisation of this indigenous character who is a teenage girl,

the eventual marriage of the almost 50 year old main character and the indigenous teenage girl,

the made up mysticism and spiritualism, characters being telepathic, weird made up rituals, the general treatment of the very, very few female characters in the book…it goes on and on

All of this comes together to make the book really quite a flawed piece of fiction. The prose can be very beautiful at times and repetitive and dull at others. The attention to historical details is impressive until it isn’t and the author makes up things about an indigenous culture and about a real young man who died horrifically. The antagonist is an evil gay trope, the exploration of morality is dull and uninterested in bigger questions about how far regular, good people are willing to go to survive. There was so much potential here and unfortunately, for me, the book fell short.

If you like the concept of The Terror but don’t like a lot of the above, I would recommend watching the AMC adaption instead. A lot of these issues are resolved or at least mitigated to some extent by the TV show. If you still want to read the book, I won't dissuade anyone. Despite my frustrations, I did enjoy large parts of the book, in particular getting to see the perspective of multiple different characters from different social classes and ranks. I think Dan Simmons was brilliant for writing the novel this way, it resulted in some really effective storytelling in many parts of the book. Just be ready for a lot of ridiculous character motivations, homophobia, racist tropes, and made up mythology along the way.

Content Warnings

quillsand's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

as per the rules of the Kayleigh Rating System this book would usually get 5 stars for the intensity of emotion it made me feel but i felt ick giving it 5 stars because i think using Inuit lore as the basis for horror is a bittt problematic coming from a white dude and also whilst i acknowledge the huge amount of research done into Inuit cultures smth about the ending just doesn't Sit Right

that said the other 95% of the book was disturbing as all hell and bleak as fuck. but like, in a good way. i read this whilst at a festival and i kept returning to my tent to read instead of watching acts. the vivid descriptions of scurvy gave me trouble sleeping and i stopped readig it in public places because i couldn't control my facial expressions of horror/revulsion/despair. also i think scurvy has now replaced both pregnancy and getting my wisdom teeth taken out on my list of greatest fears, meaning it is now #2 behind moths.

parts that really got to me included

mr blanky's escape from the tuunbaq, irving laughing and joking with the Inuit, the entire thing with peglar and bridgens, goodsir talking about scurvy and documenting his own symptoms, fitzjames' death, fucking JOPSON being left behind on his BIRTHDAY (that scene was harrowing and like. i knew it would be harrowing! i have seen the show none of this was news but oh my god. oh my. god.), goodsir's death... just goodsir in general, to be honest. hickey was also more enjoyable as a chaotic creature here than in the show.

i just think it says something that depsite having watched the show and knowing how everything plays out and already being very distrubred by the show, the book managed to somehow provoke an even stronger reaction and kept me so gripped i got through all 750 pages in under 5 days whilst being at a music festival. book ratings are based off of my connection to the book and despite all it's issues i sure did feel many things whilst reading this!!! the real terror is the slowly creeping inevitability of certain death and the fact that we know!! we know that no matter how hard these character struggle, they will all be claimed by the ice by the time the book is finished!! there's beauty in that and in the sheer humanity of how different people respond to the certainty of death in different ways. makes me a little bit insane if i think about it too much.

i do think the supernatural aspects were the weakest point for me and the last 80 pages were therefore not as strong as the rest but only because the realism of the horror was already at its peak (also the aforementioned ick about using Inuit culture as a backdrop for horror fiction but anyway) with the scurvy and the frostbite and the starvation and whatnot.

id on't know man sometimes you just need a horrifying horrific tragedy heavily based on real events that deeply disturbs and upsets you in order to cope!!!!

i think i am going to rewatch the show now.

Content Warnings

mousey's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

Really terrifying read. The visuals are insane and disgusting, but in a very captivating way. Very long but it goes by fast, the mounting tension keeps you interested throughout all 700 pages.

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