I enjoyed the factual items included about Dickens and Collins but felt that the plot could have been tighter. Employing a narrator who cannpt be trusted is a time honored tradition and I loved the idea of using Wilkie collins as such, but was aghast at the result. I admit, I am biased. I remember reading my first Wilkie Collins the summer between 8th grade and high-school and it was such a joy. I object to his portrayal in the book, mainly because it is well researched and I fear people could take some of the fiction seriously because it is couched in so much fact. ( )

On the face of it, a book about the 'true' story behind the unfinished 'Mystery of Edwin Drood' which Dickens was halfway through when he died, sounded interested. The story is narrated by Wilkie Collins, known for 'The Lady in White' and 'The Moonstone', being a memoir which he intends should be read only long after his death in the 1880s. For this reason, he often addresses the 'Dear Reader' he imagines will read this in the future.

One unfortunate glitch early on and throughout is the use of American terms by a nineteenth century Englishman: sidewalk instead of pavement, drapes instead of curtains and various others including gotten, the use of which died out well before the nineteenth century. So that was irritating.

It's hard to review this book because it encompasses so many things. The core is the relationship between the younger, forty-something, Collins and Dickens who is about a decade older. Despite what appears to be a warm friendship on the surface - the two men went on various adventures together when they were younger and Collins is a frequent visitor to Dickens' home - Collins is eaten up with envy which develops into a hatred of Dickens that eventually becomes potentially murderous. His character is chockful of flaws, including casual racism (possibly endemic for that era so not unique to him) and misogyny - to him, women are animalistic and bovine - and he has a serious laudanum and opium addiction which worsens over time and eventually involves morphine prescribed by his doctor for his rheumatic gout.

Given that he is drinking enough laudanum to kill anyone who hasn't built up his tolerance level, and pays regular visits to opium dens, he is an unreliable narrator par excellence. Eventually it becomes impossible to believe anything he tells the reader because it becomes so extreme. He is also repellent as a character, especially to anyone with sympathy for either animals or downtrodden individuals such as his common law wife or the servants.

Another issue is that the writing is turgid - if meant to be an imitation of the style of Dickens etc, it doesn't come over as that. Whenever he mentions anybody, Collins gives their entire name, multiple times within a scene, and everything is spelled out repetitively, with constant reminders about things already mentioned, as if the author is being paid by the word. All this contributes to a book that is nearly 900 pages long, and has no need to be - it would have benefited from a lot of judicious editing. There are some powerful scenes of action, but most of the story is so overworked that it becomes tedious, especially with the unnecessary background research recounted in practically every scene. The style and info-dumping more or less kill any suspense that might otherwise attend the appearances of the supernatural Drood and his followers. And the scene on the stairwell involving a certain luckless maidservant is more reminiscent of 'Alien' than anything and has no explanation whatsoever.

I checked Wikipedia to see if any of it had a basis in fact: Collins did live with a widow called Caroline and her daughter, and would not marry her, and she did marry a man with the same name as her second husband in the book, but returned to Collins. Frankly, given how in the book he engineers for her to have such an unhappy marriage, that fails to convince, but of course the real story must have been quite different. He also had children with another woman, as in the novel, but Wikipedia disagrees on the number and gender. And the material on the ex-police chief Charles Field doesn't square with the facts, since he died four years after Dickens, not before him, and only had his pension suspended for four months - reinstated by the Home Secretary because he had already given up the private enquiry work to which the authorities objected.

The problem I find most extreme is that, if Dickens' apology late on in the book is meant to be "true" in the context of the story, it's difficult to know what actually does and doesn't happen. This makes the whole story rather meaningless. At the end, having forced myself through the last two or three hundred pages just to find out what happened, it wasn't at all clear if Collins broke the 'spell' he had been under. Given that I found the book so disappointing, I can only give it one star. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2023/11/review-of-drood-by-dan-simmons.html ( )

Wonderfully Written, but not enough story in between the asides to really feel substantial. The ending feels like a letdown. Sadly the first Dan Simmons book I haven't been captivated by ( )

I like Dan Simmons.. I did not like this. I just got really tired of the rambling, opiate induced, untrustworthy narrative. ( )