The Terror. Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons has written a novel of extraordinary epic power in a now forgotten direction of literature about the heroic confrontation of man and blind, powerful and cruel nature. Someone will find analogies here with Herman Melville's "Moby Dick", someone this work will remind of a tougher and darker version of Jack London's stories about the north, but these will be only rather approximate analogies that completely dissipate at the first acquaintance with this novel. In the process of working on "Terror" Dan Simmons worked on archives for a long time and carefully, as a result of which, while reading the novel, there is a feeling of presence among the heroes of a real expedition of two ships of the Royal Navy of Great Britain - "Erebus" and "Terror", which in 1845 left their home port in search of the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. The ships never returned, and Simmons, along with a detailed description of the expedition, gives his vision of the reasons for its fiasco.

The North, fierce cold and no less acute hunger, as well as death from something supernatural, which is always lurking somewhere nearby, time and again taking the lives of the expedition members. Against the backdrop of the literally deadly beautiful landscapes of the North, there is a struggle with nature indifferent and cruel to man, a struggle with something unknown, which neither guns nor the fiercest storms of the northern winter can stop, in the end, a struggle with each other, because, as has been known since ancient times, man is the most terrible and cruel beast.