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    Drood: A Novel
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    Drood: A Novel
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    Drood: A Novel
    Audiobook (abridged)10 hours

    Drood: A Novel

    Written by Dan Simmons

    Narrated by Simon Prebble

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens -- at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world -- hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
    Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London- mere research . . . or something more terrifying?
    Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateFeb 9, 2009
    ISBN9781600244643
    Unavailable
    Drood: A Novel
    Author

    Dan Simmons

    Dan Simmons is the Hugo Award-winning author of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and their sequels, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. He has written the critically acclaimed suspense novels Darwin's Blade and The Crook Factory, as well as other highly respected works, including Summer of Night and its sequel A Winter Haunting, Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort, and Worlds Enough & Time. Simmons makes his home in Colorado.

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    Reviews for Drood

    3.5/5

    776 ratings97 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Interesting take on the last days of Dickens. Collins is an interesting fellow. Addicted to opium, jealous, and in pain. It seems as if all the accomplishments of his life ended in vain. The ending is quite open to speculation. Was it all imagined or not? Willkie does become quite depsicable. But he is right about one thing. In the far future many of us have never heard of him. But now that I have, I will pick up some of his work. I made it a point to read "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" before reading this. And I am glad that I did. Overall a good book, long and drawn out. It took some stamina to get through. But hey... if you can read something like Melmoth the Wanderer or The Count of Monte Cristo then this should be a piece of cake. I found alot of similarities with Melmoth.
    • 2/5
      This book is well written, although not without its flaws. Dan Simmons occasionally has a tendency to be a little too pleased with himself when it comes to historical research, which results in a some additional unnecessary exposition that feels like it is there just to prove that Simmons knows the information that is being shared.

      In the opening of the book, the narrator (a fictionalized Wilkie Collins) asks a question that reads like the most ridiculous example of some sort of sensationalist thesis paper. Honestly, I almost set the book down then, and probably would have if I hadn't had so many previous good experiences with Simmons' books. Also, the end was quite a disappointment. It isn't that it comes out of nowhere, as the premise is set up clearly in the preceding narrative, just that it feels cheap. It's as if Simmons had developed this fantastic story, but couldn't think of any other way of making it gel with recorded history. Others may disagree with me, but I found it to be quite a let down.

      The shame of all this is that the story is fantastic. I was deeply engrossed throughout the course of the novel, and the characters were well drawn and fascinating. This is a great tale that begins and ends badly, and as such, cripples the piece as a whole. I want to love this book: the characters, atmosphere and attention to detail are compelling. However, I have a hard time recommending it to my friends for the flaws above.

      If you are looking to try out a piece of historical fiction from Dan Simmons, try The Crook Factory, which I whole-heartedly loved.
    • 3/5
      I really like most of Dan Simmons' work, but I don't know what to make of this one. Is it a historical fiction of the last few years of Charles Dickens' life, as told by his opium-addicted, friend and competitor Wilkie Collins with some fantasy aspects added? Is it meant to be more fiction than fantasy, almost entirely the opium dreams of Mr. Collins? It is really hard to tell. I thought this was well written and interesting, but way too long. I thought this should have been about 250 pages, not 750. Good, but I'm really not sure what to think of it. Ultimately, it was too long.if you haven't read Dan Simmons' work before, don't start with this one. Try the Hyperion series or Abominable.
    • 3/5
      This journey through the cemeteries, opium dens and underground sewers of Victorian London is a good atmospheric read, but doesn't quite live up to its fascinating premise. However, it will almost certainly leave you wanting to learn more about Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and their works, which can only be a good thing.Drood begins with the Staplehurst Rail Disaster of 1865, when the train on which Charles Dickens is travelling crashes. As Dickens helps to rescue people from the wreckage, he encounters a mysterious figure dressed in a black cape who introduces himself only as 'Drood'. In the days following the train crash, Dickens becomes obsessed with discovering Drood's true identity. With the reluctant help of his friend and fellow author, Wilkie Collins, Dickens begins a search for Drood which leads them through the dark alleys and underground catacombs of London.Interspersed with the Drood storyline are long passages in which we learn about the family life of both Dickens and Collins, how much they earned for their various novels, the details of Wilkie's laudanum addiction, Dickens' interest in mesmerism and every other piece of biographical information you could wish to know. Some readers might find this boring, but I enjoyed these sections - I thought the descriptions of Dickens' reading tours were particularly interesting. Another thing I liked about the book was the way Simmons deliberately tries to confuse and mislead the reader - at several points in the novel we are made to wonder whether something we've just read is real or an illusion.The book is told in the form of a memoir written by Wilkie Collins and addressed to an unknown reader in the future. Simmons has attempted to imitate Collins' narrative style but I felt that he didn't get it quite right. He uses a lot of words and phrases that just sound either too modern or too American to me. Collins is one of my favourite writers, but in Drood he is portrayed as a mediocre author who is consumed with jealousy of the more successful Dickens and becomes increasingly bitter and unlikeable as the book goes on. I've read a lot of Wilkie Collins books and loved every one of them - I think he was a much better writer than this book suggests.Overall, Drood could have been a fantastic book but left me feeling slightly disappointed.
    • 3/5
      Engaging, thrilling, ponderous, digressive, predictable, researched, interesting.
    • 3/5
      Took a good while to get around to finishing it, but a worthy read in the end.
    • 1/5
      Complete waste of time.
    • 5/5
      In this superb novel of historical fiction, psychological suspense and crime mystery, Dan Simmons recreates the world of mid-Victorian England as seen from the highly distorted perspective of one of the leading British men of letters of the age- Mr. Wilkie Collins. Specifically, the novel takes the form of a memoir of Collins, addressed to Readers of the Future (at least a century after his own time) and purports to recount the strained relationship he had with Charles Dickens in the last five years of that great author's life, during the years from 1865 to '70. What makes this account no ordinary auto-biography and instead a fantastic and grotesque tale is that Collins asserts that Dickens was involved in the sinister underground cult of an Egyptian creature called Drood, that he caused Collins to become a victim of Drood, and Collins' admission to being a drug addict and his claim that he is afflicted by the visitation of certain monstrous beings that we, the readers, suspect are figments of his narcotic-induced psychopathy. Simmons takes care to provide this gothic horror story a secure frame of historic fact. The larger events in the lives of Dickens and Collins to which he refers really did happen. Dickens really was almost killed in a railway accident at Staplehurst on June 9, 1865. He really was fascinated by mesmerism and fancied himself a proficient practitioner of the mesmeric art. And he truly did come close to collapsing several times during his final reading tour, just months before his death. Of course, Simmons has also done research on the opium dens of Victorian London, the squalid crime and disease infested neighborhoods of the city and the plutonic depths of the city beneath the city- which are depicted as the domain of Drood and his minions.In Wilkie Collins, as Simmons has him portray himself, we have perhaps the most unreliable narrator in all of literature. He admits to consuming laudanum by the bottleful, and to smoking opium in ever increasing amounts at increasing frequency. He also is clearly insane, suffering from paranoid delusions and probably schizophrenia. The real Collins, as well as Simmons' fictional version of him, was a well-known novelist. He wrote such popular novels as "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone" and adapted several of his works to the stage with some measure of critical acclaim and commercial success. But he lived and worked in the shadow of his friend and mentor, the incomparable Charles Dickens. In "Drood", Simmons shows Collins' old friendship and collaboration with Dickens, who was twelve years his senior, turning into resentment and then active, though veiled, hatred. He portrays Collins as insanely jealous of the older writer's popularity- and, of course, he blames Dickens for exposing him to the monster Drood. It's good that Collins has been dead for well over a century, for he comes off so badly in this novel that his family or estate might have a case for libel against Simmons. But the fictional Collins, at Simmons' hands, rewards the reader with a satisfying study in psychological horror-as seen from inside the madman's tormented skull.
    • 4/5
      When I sat down to type up a review of Dan Simmons' Drood I looked back at what I'd written about the last book of his that I read (The Terror, in 2009). I found that I could repeat many of the things I said there: some annoying repetition, a few odd anachronisms, a great big long book that could have benefited from a slightly heavier editorial hand. Unlike the high Arctic, though, this one is set in the dark and gloomy streets of Dickens' London, and recounts the last few years of the author's life from the perspective of his friend and rival Wilkie Collins. Good, but not great, overall.
    • 1/5
      Story about Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and their search for a mystical person called Drood. Very long winded , hard to finish. I did not care for his writing style.
    • 4/5
      Wow, baggy as a pair of gangsta pants. But fun.
    • 4/5
      I'm a voracious reader, but it took me a LONG time to make my way through this quirky sort-of historical novel. It's not that I was tempted to abandon it; it's just a really long book.Recommended (and even loaned) by a friend, I found the novel to be a fascinating story of one author's (Wilkie Collins, best known for THE MOONSTONE, generally considered to be the first detective novel) love/hate relationship with his era's most popular novelist (Charles Dickens). Collins' dependence on increasing doses of laudanum (he eventually adds opium and morphine to his regimen) makes the reader increasingly doubtful of the weird tale he spins about an eerie character that Dickens encountered following a horrific train accident. Not only drugs but mesmerism cloud the issue.Collins descends deeper and deeper into madness, while the reader (at least this one) grows increasingly confused.It's a solid book, and I came away from it with a much more solid feel for life among the various strata of England in the period following the American Civil War.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing, creative, gripping book that is very hard to put into words other than the author's own amazing ones. Ostentatiously, it is the story of Charles Dickens' final years on earth, told through the highly unreliable narrative lens of Wilkie Collins, and the explanation behind what drove Dickens' to write the tragically unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.I was drawn to this book originally because it seemed to be a literary thriller. It sat on my shelf for a while until I actually read The Mystery of Edwin Drood and told my dad I was sad I would never know the ending Dickens had in mind for it. My dad reminded me about Drood and I immediately picked it up.It did move a little slow at first, but once it got moving, it never stopped. I quite literally could not put this book down by the end, and spent my lunch break during a full-day teaching conference curled up in a chair flipping pages. This book now has me wanting to read more Collins and Dickens, especially their biographies.
    • 3/5
      I have really liked almost everything have read by Simmons up to now (the exceptions beings a couple of short stories and his novella length contribution to Songs of a Dying Earth). While I enjoyed the historical setting, and the book left me wanting to read some Dickens (whom I haven't read in 25 years) and Collins (whom I have never read), overall, Drood left me disappointed. I thought the first third of the book provided a nice set-up, but then we got endless repetitions that never really went anywhere. Collins is an annoying protagonist, not because he is outrageously unreliable, and not because of his homicidal tendencies, and not because of the disgraceful way he treats women, but because he keeps telling us the same thing over and over and over and over. There are a couple of pulse-pounding scenes (with resultant puzzling over what really happened and what was laudanum inspired hallucination). I found the conclusion reasonably strong.
    • 4/5
      This book is a nice blend of historical fiction and horror genres. The book is told from the perspective of Wilkie Collins and tells the story of the last five years of Charles Dickens life. The book tells the story behind the unfinished manuscript about the mysterious Drood. Overall an interesting and entertaining tale.
    • 4/5
      I'm a huge fan of "The Terror" by Simmons. This novel is not as brilliant as that one, but it was very entertaining. It is disquieting and disturbing and a bit odd in the end. It tells the story of the friendship between Dickens and Collins, and their peculiar experiences with disturbing entities.
    • 4/5
      It's been a few months since I read Drood, but like a good movie, it sticks to my ribs. I'm still thinking about how much I enjoyed it. At over 700 pages, it was quite a hefty read, but I liked all of it and I'd read it again.Of course now when I read an actual book by Wilkie Collins, I'll be disappointed if it doesn't read like Dan Simmons' Wilkie.
    • 3/5
      The first time I read Drood, I was in awe. All the literary references, and I was already mentally analysing the ending and thinking how I could write a commentary about it. But the second time? Shockingly (at least to me), I got bored with it. I couldn't read more than half the book without putting it down. Perhaps it was the length, which I didn't mind the first time but did the second. Now, I just find the book a bit too slow. But on the bright side, it has sparked my interest in Wilkie Collins, and I've started reading his books, such as The Moonstone.
    • 5/5
      I am a big fan of Dan Simmons, primarily for his conscientious use of the English language, making the story being told all the more effective for the way the story is told.Ostensibly, this story is a fictional account of the events leading up to Charles Dickens' unfinished "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." The story is told from the perspective of Dickens' contemporary (and apparently occasional friend) Wilkie Collins, whose claim it is that Edwin Drood in fact was a real person of sinister character who had introduced Dickens (and apparently Collins, as well) into the seamy underbelly of London society. What really seems to evolve is the gradual, overpowering, addiction Collins had to laudanum, and his apparently gradual decline in mental capacity. Simmons does marvelous work filling in the facts of Dickens' and Collins' relationship and the development of the latter works of both men with a fictional tale that implies that Collins was perhaps jealous of Dickens' success, and was insecure in his abilities as a writer - especially when compared to the immensely popular Dickens.As in his earlier book "Terror," Simmons shows the sort of conscientiousness that is essential to writers of historical fiction. The facts come first, for Simmons, and he sees his task as one of creating a fictional world consistent with those facts, but which also stretches the imagination in delicious ways.
    • 5/5
      Another great one by Dan Simmons. Big, fat book full of enjoyment.
    • 3/5
      I generally shy away from historical fiction, especially the kind that fictionalizes the lives of very famous historical figures. Still, I was very excited to read this book. I enjoy Victorian novels and mysteries, and this book had both. How could it miss? Right? Well, it does miss. Simmons does a great job of copying the Victorians style of writing, including directly addressing "Dear Reader" on many occasions. Unfortunately, Simmons also copies man Victorian authors' habit of going on at length about peripheral details that don't really contribute to moving the plot along. I usually enjoy long, descriptive novels and am not an enthusiast of plot driven novels, but this plot needed some faster driving. I started out really enjoying Wilkie Collins' voice as the narrator, and I have no idea if the character accurately reflects the real man. However, after a few hundred pages, he wore on me. He starts out a skeptic and then too easily becomes a true believer. He starts out a friend and admirer, albeit a jealous one, of Charles Dickens and then begins to hate Dickens. Again, I have no idea of the accuracy of the portrayal of either man. I just thought his descent into murderous hatred was not believable at all. Yes, he was a drug addict, but he seems to be too high functioning to have descended into the kind of madness, whether real of imagined, that occurs. Basically, this book would have been much more enjoyable if it had been about half as long as it is.
    • 3/5
      This was a very interesting book that needed to be at least 200 pages shorter than it was.For the most part I found it fascinating and an engaging read that sucked me into the world of both Dickens and Collins, I felt like I was transported back to the Victorian times both good and bad.And while I didn't like either of the characters, and I'm not sure I was supposed to, I do feel as if I know them very well.The research he must put into his work is phenomenal.However, as I said above, the book was longer than it needed to be and began to be a chore to finish around 500 or so. And I did not like the ending at all.In fact, part of my problem finishing it could very well be because I could see where the author was going and didn't care for it.The ending twist wasn't much of a twist and has been done so many times before, it almost made me feel as though I had wasted my time reading up to that point.ALMOST. As much as I didn't care for the ending, I still feel the rest of the book was worth reading and very engaging.
    • 5/5
      Charles Dickens, while being one of England's pre-eminent authors, had a fascination with the underbelly of London. A social progressive in certain areas, he advocated for the poorest of the poor, and frequently roamed the alleys and backalleys of London's worst tenements in his attempt to draw attention to their plight.This book chronicles the final years of Dicken's life, beginning with a horrible train accident at Staplehurst that may have changed his outlook and the course of the rest of his life.Told from the POV of Wilkie Collins, Dicken's friend, sometime collaborator, sometime rival, and brother-in-law (Dicken's daughter Katie married Wilkie's brother Charles), it is also Wilkie's story.A lidless, pale man with teeth filed to points - that is Drood, who Dickens says he saw at Staplehurst moving among the injured and dying. Dickens also thinks that Drood was taking the souls of those he visited, and he enlists Wilkie to help him track down this mysterious figure, going into the mysterious Undertown that exists beneath London proper and coming back with a tale of Egyptian magic, mesmerism, and dark acts.We read of Dicken's fascinations: cannibalism, mesmerism, and his young mistress Ellen Ternan, who was traveling with him at Staplehurst that day - the reason he turned his wife of 22 years and the mother of his 10 children, Catherine, out of his home and life.Wilkie has his own dark secrets, a dependence on large quantities of laudanum and later opium, a "housekeeper" who lives with him, and a mistress who he keeps rooms for as well. He also has spectral, but seemingly corporeal, visitors: "The Other Wilkie", and a green lady with sharp teeth.As Wilkie's murderous instincts grow and he and Dicken's friendship begins to flag, we begin to wonder if Drood is indeed a cruel murderer surrounded by equally heartless minions who think nothing of killing and disemboweling a former London inspector, or if this shadowy world of scarabs who inhabit bodies, and dark Egyptian ritual is a product of murky hallucination or imagination.A lot of research went into this novel, and Mr. Simmons was kind enough to list a lot of his reference material towards the back. Ever curious to know more, I will be looking much of it up, as well as reading Collin's The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which both feature prominently in this novel.If you like twisting, brooding, gothic, Dickensian types of mystery where the answers aren't always clear, mysteries that make you think and use your own imagination, you MUST have this one on your shelf. I was totally drawn in almost from the first, and fascinated by this fictionalized account of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens (as well as Drood, in this novel the basis for Dicken's unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood). There really were people who were so poor that they relegated themselves to living in the sewer systems of London and Paris. We also "meet" some of the characters that were the basis for some of Dicken's own characters. I want to know more - more about Collins, more about Dickens the man, more about the society they lived and worked in.This is a hefty read, but so totally well worth it.QUOTESDid the famous and loveable and honourable Charles Dickens plot to murder an innocent person and dissolve away his flesh in a pit of caustic lime and secretly inter what was left of him, mere ones and a skull, in the crypt of an ancient cathedral that was an important part of Dicken's own childhood? And did Dickens then scheme to scatter the poor victim's spectacles, rings, stickpins, shirt studs, and pocket watch in the River Thames? And if so, or even if Dickens only dreamed he did those things, what part did a very real phantom named Drood have in the onset of such madness?"If Drood is an illusion, my dear Wilkie, he is an illusion in the form of upper London's worst nightmare. He is a darkness in the heart of the soul's deepest darkness. He is the personified wrath of those who have lost the last meagre rays of hope in our modern city and our modern world."Or perhaps he was attempting suicide by reading tour.I admit, Dear Reader, that this final possibility not only occurred to me and made sense to me, but confused me. At this point, I wanted to be the one to kill Charles Dickens. But perhaps it would be tidier if I merely helped him commit suicide this way.Writing: 5 out of 5 starsPlot: 4.75 out of 5 starsCharacters: 5 out of 5 starsReading Immersion: 4.5 out 5 starsBOOK RATING: 4.8 out of 5 stars
    • 3/5
      It's a long and interesting book. As readers, we usually believe or make ourselves to believe the narrator of the story (either author or "I" in the book). However, this book keeps imply how unreliable the story teller was. The story is very dark. My only complain is it's too long. If you are not interested in Victorian stuff, you may be scared away from it at the beginning.
    • 4/5
      I greatly enjoyed this book. Simmons does a great job of having the story slowly unfold, along with our realization that all may not be as it seems in the relationship between Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. It's mysterious and atmospheric; yes, it's long but I was with him on every page. I enjoyed it all the way through.
    • 3/5
      Definitely a sweeping historical novel. I really enjoyed Simmons' book "The Terror", and that's why I bought this one. But I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It dragged on terribly in places, and at the end I was hard pressed to make myself finish it. I gave it 3 stars based on the writing, not the whole of the story.
    • 5/5
      A stunning historical literary mystery, I ended up listening to the audio presentation of it, which was performed by Simon Prebble (who won the Audie Award for best reader this year). I can't say enough good things about "Drood"--its pacing, plot, and characters were all masterfully written that I'll be sure to check out other Dan Simmons books. The reading by Simon Prebble was flat-out fantastic--he made my hair stand on end at the end, as Wilkie Collins is finishing his confession, and made Collins' madness so palpable that I was absolutely thrilled. I picked this up in part to get more into mysteries--an area I know nothing about and am asked about all the time at the library--and was listening to it at the same time as I was reading Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo". In comparison to "Drood," I have to say Larsson's book seems like a crass work of fiction that relies on such bald violence and victimization to draw the reader in--the same kind of tasteless and talentless writing that informs television shows like Law & Order: SVU (or Special Perverts Unit, as I refer to it).
    • 3/5
      OK Book. Interesting but long winded. I love Dan Simmons but this one is near the bottom.
    • 4/5
      "Drood" is more than a book; it is an experience, a total immersion into Victorian England and the personal lives of two of the most famous authors of the day: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Either way the reader chooses to experience this Dan Simmons book, by reading it or by listening to the audio book version, is a major commitment of time and effort. The book itself is almost 800 pages long and the audio version of 24 CDs requires just under 30 hours of listening time. The audio book, read by Simon Prebble, is the route I chose to follow. "Drood" begins with the June 1865 train wreck in which Dickens, his mistress and her mother barely escape with their lives. Amidst the mutilated, dead and dying passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish character called Drood; a man Dickens comes to believe is actually taking the lives of injured passengers rather than trying to save them. Dickens becomes obsessed with the idea of Drood and he recruits his close friend, Wilkie Collins, to help him track down the ghostlike man. Dickens, Collins, and various detectives and bodyguards will spend the next several months trying to catch up with the mysterious Drood, a man Dickens is told is responsible for more than 300 London murders. The chase will lead Dickens and Collins into London's "Undertown," a cavern-like part of the city, complete with its own underground river system, inhabited largely by criminal gangs, opium dealers and addicts, and London's thousands of orphaned street children. Things become uncomfortable for the two authors when Drood takes an interest in them and begins to manipulate the pair in unexplainable ways. There is much more to "Drood," however, than the search for a man Dickens believes to be the most successful serial-killer in England's history. This is the story of two men, both highly successful authors of their day, and their supposed friendship. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were friends and collaborators for a number of years and the working relationship seems to have served both men well. Simmons, though, chooses the voice of Wilkie Collins to narrate "Drood" and what Collins has to say about Dickens opens the reader to a whole different possibility about their relationship. As portrayed here, Wilkie Collins is not a happy man, especially when it comes to comparing his literary status to that of the only man he considers a rival, Charles Dickens. In truth, Collins despises Dickens and cannot believe that the supremacy of his work over that of Dickens is not universally recognized. After all, he has written a masterpiece in "The Woman in White" and has even created a new genre, that of the detective novel, with "The Moonstone." But Dickens is still the literary king of his day - and Charles Dickens is not above reminding Collins of that fact at every opportunity, even if he has to create those opportunities himself. As Collins struggles to surpass the reputation of Dickens, or at least to equal it, his use of opium increases to such a degree that he begins to lose touch with reality. Collins begins to suspect Dickens of murder (as research for a future novel) and has opium-induced dreams of his own in which he murders Dickens and hides his remains so that "the Inimitable" can never be buried in Westminster Abbey. Opium plays such a large role in "Drood" - and in Collins's perception of reality - that the reader will often wonder what is real and what is not. Does Drood really exist or is Dickens making his old friend the victim of a sadistic practical joke? One has to decide for himself but, in the end, it does not really matter because this book is really about the clash of two massive egos and the drug culture of the day. The mysterious Drood is just the hook on which Simmons hangs this clever character-study. Dan Simmons has written a wonderfully atmospheric, character-driven thriller that is almost certain to appeal to lovers of British literature. The audio book reader, Simon Prebble, does a remarkable job in making Dickens, Collins, and a cast of assorted characters come to life. He does such a good job of providing distinct accents and speech patterns for the main characters that they are soon recognizable by the "sounds of their voices," a feat few audio book readers even come close to achieving. Rated at :4.0
    • 4/5
      I love Victorian London, Dickens and Collins so I was always going to like this one. It's a huge read, and I love the snide, professional jealousies between the two men.