The Terror

By: Dan Simmons

Narrated by: Tom Sellwood

Length: 28 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's Summary

The men onboard HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.

©2007 Dan Simmons (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Critic Reviews

"The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years." (Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe)

" The Terror is both dazzling history and a sparkling chiller." (Caroline Leavitt, People)

" The Terror is nothing less than a revelation. Dan Simmons is a giant among novelists, and I am in awe of his achievement." (Lincoln Child)

Very good then, NOT

I love a good historical fiction, and three quarters of this book was fantastic.

A tale of hardship followed up by bad luck and tragedy. Not to give anything away, but they find themselves stuck fast in the ice while trying to find a passage to sail north of Canada. they begin to be hunted by what appears to be an extremely large Polar Bear.
The crews of the 2 ships struggle to survive and many parish. The story is told in, through the eyes experiences from many different crew members .
BUT THEN at about chapter 62 the story tales a bad left turn and never recovers.
This is my first Dan Simmons book and I was impressed in his many detailed characters,and the telling of the story through their experiences.
I will definitely try another Dan Simmons novel soon

56 of 59 people found this review helpful

BORING and terrible narration

I love a good Dan Simmons horror story but God was this boring. It goes on forever and then just goes off the rails at the end. The narration is incredibly irritating because he whispers the whole time. Overall this was a damn waste of what felt like a million hours!

33 of 35 people found this review helpful

Adam

The book started off well enough. Stranded in the ice, a mysterious beast slowly consuming them, then it fall off the rails. The solid chapters of Eskimo language, boring. Throw in some telepathy and shared dreams and you end up with barely a three star review.

33 of 35 people found this review helpful

Too Much Of A Mediocre Thing

Basically I have two main criticisms.

The first is the narrator who was just a terrible choice for this book. His voice has now depth to it, no gravitas, and listening to characters who are meant to be hard-bitten sea-faring types is akin to hearing teenagers role-playing practising their all 'grown up and stuff' voices.

As a comparison, I'm now listening to the Patrick Melrose novels narrated by Alex Jennings who's capable of giving clear and distinct voices, across accents and gender, and can thus give his characters both variation and life. Sellwood just wasn't up to this task.

The second criticism is of the book itself. If Stephen King can be accused of 'verbal diarrhoea' in the length of density of his books, then Dan Simmons must do his writing from the toilet seat.

Good grief but the man can waffle, especially towards the end of the book and in particular the last chapter or two which should be full of melancholy and atmosphere but instead seemed to be little more than the other showing off his 'Inuit to English' dictionary.

Another occasion where I find myself distinctly in the minority. How this has 4.5 stars baffles me.

So, yeah, two main criticisms of an audiobook; the audio... and the book.

33 of 35 people found this review helpful

Most implausible story I have listened to by Dan

I am not sure my review will help anyone make up their mind about whether to purchase this audio book. But the creature(s) described in The Terror, and man's means of "communing" with it/them are uterly baseles. The story telling is decent but the action scenes are few in comparison to previous Dan Simmons listens. The characters are also rather shallow and under-developed. I feel I could have given this one a "pass" and not missed anything except than as a sleep aid. But a bit of warning, the author jumps around between character sketches and action sequences, that it is very hard to doze and figure out where to rewind to, upon waking up! :)

33 of 35 people found this review helpful

Horrible story with horrible things happening

I learned after I was seven hours into this audio book that it is heavily abridged. That makes sense, whereas this shortened audio book definitely does not.

This book is about a crew that is ship wrecked in artic waters, and it details how the crew tries to save itself. I will say the book was good and fun in the beginning and at the end, but the middle drags so hard and it's so hard to care about.

32 of 34 people found this review helpful

4 hours of story told in 28+ hours

This book has all the potential to be great and has moments where it is, then there's the rest of the book -about 24 bonus hours of audible sleep medication. There are moments where this story gets super tense -then it passes and part of you knows it will be hours until something interesting happens again. I just couldn't take anymore, it was WAY TOO LONG and got super boring. I was hoping a bear would attack me just for excitement. I wish I could get my money back. I really disliked this book as a whole.

32 of 34 people found this review helpful

Don't Bother

worse than the TV series. Boring and slow. hard to hold my interest. Did not finish!!!!!

32 of 34 people found this review helpful

This man should not write. Very tedious listen.

Boring and long. Could not wait to finish it.
It was Very difficult to follow.

32 of 34 people found this review helpful

A Slog

A trek through a frozen waste is a plot summary, description and review all in one. I was disappointed to find that it's not a realistic fiction or a historic fiction but a fantasy fiction. As you may have guessed a vast majority of the book is about how cold and harsh and extreme the environment is, but that point is really made by the end of the first chapter. Reiterating it for dozens of chapters gets really old. Perhaps making such a long drawn out book does make the reader really experience the feelings of scale and hopelessness that go with struggling in a frozen hell, but who wants that? There are some reminiscences of the characters, some small expeditions, encounters and sidebars that just don't seem to go anywhere. They don't impact the story, characters and aren't really brought up again. It's… quite tedious a fair amount of time.


I was expecting more development of lord of the flies-esque break down of order and civility, but hardly a chapter or two is dedicated to that, and it's resolved with deus exmachina more than anything else. If this book was a drink, I'd mix it one part historical fiction, one part supernatural, one part comprised of 9 unresolved thematic elements, and 7 parts ice. Served in a chilled glass.


The voice actor was predictably british and I could certainly tolerate him for the duration, but he struggled finding unique voices for all the characters, females especially.

32 of 34 people found this review helpful