Introducing The Terror!

The Terror

By: Dan Simmons

First: obviously, spoilers.  

So, I decided to read this book because my mom was watching the series on AMC. I was listening while she gave me dad a sort of play-by-play of what had just happened before the commercial break.  She said something about a polar bear knocking off the top of some guy’s skull, and my dad asked if the bear knocked his head off and didn’t eat him, incredulous. My mom said no, it didn’t eat him, and that it didn’t knock his head off; it knocked the top of his head off and his brains were showing.  At this point I just said “what the hell are you guys watching?”

Her description was of a show about some men exploring the Arctic, being hunted by an unseen beast, presumably a polar bear; somehow what she was saying made it sound, to me, like it was based on a true story.  I looked it up, and the series was based on a novel of the same name. It turns out the novel is a fictionalized account of a real expedition to find the Northwest Passage!

When I saw that it was based on a novel, I purchased it on my Kindle app; I wanted to know what happened, and I don’t have the patience to wait for the series.  I’m a millennial. I am going to give this a shot, blogging the book chapter by chapter. I read through it first, then I’ll be rereading it as I write the blog posts.  I had to find out what happens! Like I said, no patience. Besides, I bought the book. That’s what they are for; reading immediately. Right? If you like (if anyone reads this) go ahead and buy or borrow this book.  We can read it together!

Before the first chapter are two maps.  The first is a large map detailing the voyage from the point the two ships were seen and ending at King William Island (which you will get to hear all about soon).  The second map is zoomed into King William Island. Is zoomed the term when it is a map? I’m a trainer, not a cartographer! On both maps there are names of various places where the novel takes place.  Some are very traditional names all British explorers seemed to give to the locations they “discovered”, like Cape Felix, Union Bay, Victory Point-if you want to roll your eyes at those feel free, I certainly did.  However, there are a few sites with far more ominous designations; an X marked “Massacre Site”, and area with “Starvation Cove” written across it. At first, “Terror Camp” sounded pretty bad too, but that was before i remembered that The Terror was one of the ships that were on the expedition.  

The next page is a forward.  It is a paragraph from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  Melville goes ahead and takes an entire paragraph to tell us that white animals are Bad Bad News, in an overly verbose and meandering sort of way.  I begrudgingly admit that the imagery is lovely in his writing, and that his writing is almost poetry. HOWEVER, I had to read Billy Budd eleven years ago, and I am still pretty mad about it.  I’m sorry Miss Scott, you had me read a lot of really amazing things in those classes but as far as Melville, there is a line where flowery writing becomes tedious.  And there is another line where tedious becomes obnoxious as fuck. Herman Melville crossed that line for me on page 3 of Billy Budd, when the narrator was still describing one man (for three.pages.).

So, the excerpt mentions white bears and white sharks, and how the whiteness of them makes them scarier than other great predators of the world.  Now that I’ve got my good ole Lit. Major hat on, it occurs to me that this book is based on a story of a bunch of white men “exploring”. White explorers don’t make good impressions, historically, and were usually Bad Bad News for the people who already lived in the places they “discovered”.  I doubt this parallel was the author’s intention, but the coincidence (or maybe it’s a correlation?) that thought draws to the feared white creatures being so scary in this paragraph is entertaining to me.

Next post I’ll start the first chapter.  The books jumps around in time, and from character to character pov.  See you next time, if you’re out there!