Drood

Drood is an 800-page historical novel by Dan Simmons, published in 2009, and on the face of it that page count should be a warning. It mostly isn't. The premise comes wrapped in a conceit: the book purports to be a secret manuscript by Wilkie Collins, friend and rival to Charles Dickens, sealed away on Collins' instruction for 125 years and finally opened to tell us what really happened between the two men. What ended their friendship? What very nearly ended in murder.

It begins with a real event. On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens, fifty-three years old and about as famous a person as could be in Victorian England, was travelling back to London by train with his mistress when the train left the rails and dropped into the marsh below at Staplehurst. Dickens survived. He climbed down among the wreckage and spent hours tending to the dying, and he came away from it permanently altered. This part is history, not invention, and Simmons uses it as the hinge for everything that follows. The Dickens who walks away from that marsh is not quite the man who boarded the train.

What Simmons adds is a figure named Drood, a cadaverous, half-Egyptian presence Dickens claims to have met moving among the dead at the crash site, and who he becomes convinced is real and stalking him. The two men, Dickens and Collins, start descending into the parts of London that polite Victorians pretended did not exist: the catacombs, the opium dens, the lime pits, an entire subterranean city of the lost and the criminal, all in pursuit of a man who may be a mesmerist, a murderer, a supernatural entity, or nothing at all. Dickens, meanwhile, has taken to performing the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist as a live reading, acting out the strangling and the beating with a relish that frightens the people who watch him and seems to be doing him no good whatsoever.

The clever, and faintly devious, move is the narrator. The whole thing is told by Collins, and Collins is a laudanum addict eating the stuff by the wine-glass, riddled with a jealousy of Dickens that has curdled into something close to hatred. He is the textbook unreliable narrator, except that Simmons commits to the unreliability so thoroughly that you stop being able to tell whether Drood is a genuine menace, a shared delusion, or a story Collins is telling to make sense of his own envy and his own ruin. The drug fog is the point. You are never standing on solid ground, because the man holding the torch cannot be trusted to know where the floor is.

Whether that works for you depends a great deal on your patience. This is a long book that takes its length seriously, and at 800 pages, there are stretches where the period detail and the circling, the constant doubling-back over the same suspicions, start to feel like the laudanum is getting to the reader as well as the narrator. Simmons is doing it on purpose. That does not make it shorter. If you want a brisk gothic mystery, this is not that, and the ambiguity that makes the book interesting is also the thing that will frustrate anyone hoping for an answer at the end. You do not really get one. You get Collins' version, and Collins is the last man you would believe.

What it does superbly is atmosphere and voice. The recreated Victorian London is dense, filthy and convincing, the friendship between the two writers is genuinely complicated rather than merely poisonous, and the central trick, an envious lesser talent narrating the slow unravelling of a greater one, gives the whole thing a nasty psychological undertow that lingers. It is a horror novel wearing a literary biography's clothes, and the disguise is good enough that you are some distance in before you notice the thing has teeth.