The year is 1848. Over a hundred men are spending their second winter trapped in their two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, off the coast of King William Island. They are surrounded by ice, wind, and darkness. They are running low on food, rum, and coal. Worst of all, they are being hunted by a preternatural creature strong enough to tear a man in half and clever enough to sneak onto the very decks of their ships. Nearly as mysterious is the young Esquimaux woman the crew call Lady Silence, who may or may not know something about these men and their fates, but whose tongue was bitten off at the root by someone or something long ago.
The Terror falls prey to some of the cliches of historical fiction. There's an extended passage in which a character expounds on the as yet unpublished theories of Darwin with which he is implausibly (though not impossibly) familiar, and Simmons only barely avoids turning his Inuit into noble savages. The monster, being an unstoppable killing machine with an unknown origin and purpose, is unavoidably reminiscent of similar figures in Simmons' science fiction novels. In another novel the monster would be a center of tension, something that can be directly faced and overcome in a way that cold and darkness cannot, but Simmons establishes fairly early on that nothing the sailors can do will more than temporarily inconvenience the creature. When answers are provided, it is in the form of an exposition dump that could have been copy-pasted from some alternate universe's Dictionary of Inuit Mythology. Nor do the characters provide much interest, for while a few are genuinely memorable, they have little to do except suffer through hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions of frostbite and scurvy, and the reader is invited to suffer alongside them.
And yet.
The final hundred pages are compelling in a way they could not have been without the long tale of thwarted adventure and dreary survival that preceded them. It could perhaps have been more artfully done, but that it was done at all is a marvel and a gift.
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