The very best and very worst thing about Drood is how heavily invested it was in Charles Dickens. Because, and here’s the thing, I really dislike that guy! He probably wrote great stories full of interestingly-drawn characters, but the names are so twee and the plots so meandering (ah, payment by the word) that I’ve never been able to get past that to whatever it is underneath that people rave about. But this book, you see, in which Dickens and fellow author William Wilkie Collins concern themselves with a mysterious foreign priest and  murderer, has narrator Collins espousing the same Dickensward distaste I have, and for some of the same reasons. So it’s nice to start off a book with someone that’s on my side.

I mislike the idea of delving very far into the plot, as Simmons is good at doling that out at his own pace; it’s only the endings that seem to fall apart. And in this case, I can truly say I don’t have that complaint. The complaints I do have are largely character-based and hard to elaborate upon other than through those spoilers I’m avoiding. Suffice it to say that for a variety of possible and overlapping reasons, our narratorial window into the world is severely compromised, making it impossible to have any confidence in unraveling the central mystery of the novel, and even worse, making one doubt that Simmons actually has any complaints about Dickens himself.

Still and all, the twists and turns are entertaining and the narrator’s personality made up quite a bit to me for his compromised perspective, so if you can live without being sure what happened[1][2], it’s a pretty fun book. Also, if you care, this is explicitly the same world as his previous The Terror, right down to the fact that Dickens and Collins wrote a play on the very topic of that missing expedition. In real history, yo!

[1] And I know that some people cannot…
[2] If you’re sure that we are told what happened and I’m just holding on to alternatives unreasonably, I am prepared to have a discussion about why that would mark pretty shoddy writing and also to bring up a pair of scenes that cast vague, formless doubt on the whole enterprise.