Drood - Dan Simmons

So, Drood was stupid. You can stop right here, because I feel a lot of words welling up in me and most of them are somehow echoes of this. Or you can go read Musingfromthesofa's review at 259 pages in and rest assured that it never gets any better.
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I wasn't going to do it, because it's long and I've just about had it up to HERE with long books, but _lethe_ said that I had to, and my spine is made of marshmallows. And I kind of don't regret it, because it was stupid, but it was hilariously, readably stupid. It's like that time my roommate and I got stuck watching Cruel Intentions because Judge Judy was a re-run, and at every commercial break we'd be all, This is awful. I've never seen a movie this bad. We should watch something else...I'm going to make coffee, you want some? And then we watched the whole thing.

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Just as you are about to read this whole thing, which is less of a 'review' and more of a litany of Things That Were Dumb.

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Ok, so 'Wilkie Collins' (who would never write this shit) tells the story of Charles Dickens' obsession with this eyelidless phantom thing Drood that he met when his train derailed etc etc etc. And really, I am a suck for a mystery. Be forewarned, the mystery sort of unsatisfactorily dissipates, and then the book ends. So that's dumb.

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ALSO dumb is that 'Collins' theoretically packs the book up to be opened a hundred years hence (so, now) to protect the innocent, or something, which creates the unfortunate necessity of defining words for his Dear Reader of the Future which have passed out of usage WITHOUT ANY WAY OF KNOWING WHICH WORDS THOSE WILL BE!!! Like, why not explain to us what drinking is, just in case we've discovered technology to render it useless? Also, it's irritating to have someone who lives in the 21st century speculating about what it might be like.

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And musings hit it on the head when she said that Simmons' research couldn't go to waste. I have done some excellent research in my day that never made it into any papers because it was totally irrelevant. Simmons does not have this problem. He is an amazing shoe-horner of facts. Also quotes, which I'm assuming he mostly lifted from Dickens' letters, as they were often apropos of nothing.

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Some quotes from Simmons himself, or Quotes of Idiocy:

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'This curse...had been worse even than Drood. And nothing is worse than Drood.' Except...this curse?

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A man's death-throes are described as being 'like the hisses and death grunts of a boar pierced through the lungs by several large calibre bullets.' Which is...specific.

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And then a minute later: 'Then the man fainted, dropping into the marsh more like someone shot through the heart than through the lungs.' I don't know how a man shot through the heart or through the lungs drops. HOW IS THIS A HELPFUL COMPARISON!?!?

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'How ironic it would have been if I had died on Carrick Fell because of Charles Dickens's covert passion for an eighteen-year-old actress who had absolutely no awareness of his feelings for her.' Why yes, Dan, that is the black fly in my chardonnay! (Note: I think you mean 'tragic' or 'unfortunate.' Irony is...something else.)

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And when Dickens and Drood first meet, Drood introduces himself and Dickens says 'The word came out sounding most like "dread."' Then why 'Drood'? You haven't seen it in writing. Lessee, he said this word that sounds like a real word, but I'm gonna go ahead and hear it as this other, not-a-real-word word.

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And then he would explain why he had chosen a particular word, like, he's narrating away all 'bla bla bla the stone screamed,' and then 'I say "screamed" rather than "screeched" or "squealed" because it sounded exactly like a woman screaming' and yes, we get it, you are a writer! Well done, Simmons, you are establishing our narrator as a word-choosy writer. Gold star.

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And I know the book is long (771 pages), and that it probably took him longer to write it than me to read it, but if I remember that this is the fourth or fifth time you're telling us that you call your mistress' daughter Harriet 'Carrie' at home (for no discernible reason, but you do, you definitely do. OH how often you do and then point out that you do), maybe his editor should have caught it. And the other eleventy times he repeated himself.

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And he used waaaaaaay too many parenthetical asides and yes, Hello kettle? This is the pot calling. I get it. But his paranthetical asides were unnecessarily parenthesized, or unnecessary altogether (see above paragraph about over-researching) AND he totally always used the MOST AMOUNT OF WORDS POSSIBLE TO SAY A THING!!! AND HAD TOO MANY THINGS TO SAY!!! AND SAID THEM TOO MANY TIMES!!! AND THEN SAID WHY HE SAID THEM!!!

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And then I went and poked around on the intarwebs for twenty minutes so that I wouldn't have to think about how to end this post. Because I have clearly lost my shit.

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Two caterpillars.

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Also, reading this ruined the ending of The Moonstone for me. Sad face.