The Terror (Roca Editorial Historica)

by Dan Simmons

[pamela]

I absolutely understand why so many people love The Terror. It's atmospheric, descriptive, well-researched, and beautifully written, but despite all of that, I still didn't enjoy it.

The Terror started strong. The descriptions of the ship, the icy environments, and the creeping dread of the isolation were spectacular, and I was definitely hooked. But after a while, those descriptions that had drawn me in at the beginning began to feel boring and repetitive. Pages and pages of the same descriptions of the same environment wore thin after a while, and at that point, I just started getting bored.

The plot isn't particularly world-shattering, but it's well-researched and well-rendered, which meant that didn't particularly matter. But by the time the descriptions started getting repetitive, it was hard not to see the plot as just some grim death march to the inevitable. Consequently, it was difficult to invest myself in any of the characters.

My biggest gripe was in the book's depiction of women. I don't think every book has to have female representation, and I also think there's a case for representing historical misogynist attitudes in characterisation, but this book included some women and made some very specific choices about how to represent them. Every woman in the story was either maternal or sexual. There was no nuance to their characters like there was with the men. The Terror was very much about the male gaze. The one strong female character in the book who was written with any kind of longevity was quite literally silenced, so was unable to tell her own story. And even she, despite being relatively young, was forced into a relationship with some old guy at the end to ensure that she played her role as a breeder.

As far as the representation of the Inuit goes, I'm definitely not the right person to comment on that in any great detail save to say that I was slightly taken out of the narrative by the "magical othering" of them. They were a plot device used for a rather unnecessary horror narrative. Where the book shone was its representation of the horror of the arctic. It felt like the horror aspects were tacked on simply because Simmons knew the book would be boring without it.

The Terror would have been a much better book had it been about 300 pages shorter. It was far too long, with too much repetition to keep my interest for too long, and a horror plot that felt like it was an afterthought. Definitely not the book for me.