Ratings138
Average rating4
Dan Simmons's novel is an interesting blend of historical exploration, supernatural horror, and Inuit mythology.
It's flawed: overly long and written from so many different perspectives with so many different characters that it's hard to keep track of whose story is being followed. Plus Simmons makes an odd stylistic choice to have most deaths reported after the fact in exposition rather than shown in scene.
But even so, it's a fascinating page-turner. The crews of the Erebus and Terror ships are in constant danger from mutiny and a supernatural beast that stalks and kills them. But the biggest danger, and the book's scariest antagonist, is the setting itself: sub-zero temperatures that cause frostbite in minutes, storms and fog that reduce visibility to near zero, barren land with no animal or plant life, ice that constantly shifts to create pressure ridges, seracs, and crevasses, total darkness in the winter and no dark in the summer, and the various diseases that come from poor nutrition.
The men of the arctic expedition have the arrogance to think they can tame nature and turn the most brutal environment on Earth into a commercial passage and it is that hubris that leads to their slow, violent, painful deaths.