The Terror (2007)
The Terror is a 2007 historical fiction book written by Dan Simmons.
In 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find the Northwest Passage. The ships never came home. Simmons takes that historical fact and locks the reader in with the crews through two sunless winters in the pack ice: coal dwindling, tinned provisions turning suspect, scurvy setting in, the ice groaning against the hulls. Beyond the lantern light, something is hunting the men, taking them one at a time. Captain Francis Crozier of the Terror, a career sailor with few illusions left, must hold the expedition together as discipline, hope and the ships themselves are slowly crushed.
Quick answers
What is The Terror about?
In 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find the Northwest Passage. The ships never came home. Simmons takes that historical fact and locks the reader in with the crews through two sunless winters in the pack ice: coal dwindling, tinned provisions turning suspect, scurvy setting in, the ice groaning against the hulls. Beyond the lantern light, something is hunting the men, taking them one at a time. Captain Francis Crozier of the Terror, a career sailor with few illusions left, must hold the expedition together as discipline, hope and the ships themselves are slowly crushed.
When was The Terror published?
The Terror was published on 10 December 2007.
Who made The Terror?
The Terror was written by Dan Simmons.
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Explore The Terror guides
The Terror in our writing
- Companion guide: Hyperion Cantos: The Complete Guide to Dan Simmons' Far-Future Epic
A few thoughts on The Terror
AMC's The Terror adapts this novel with unusual fidelity and a career-best Jared Harris as Crozier; watch it after reading, not before. FROM traps a town the way the ice traps these ships, with something patient waiting in the dark, and John Carpenter's The Thing remains the definitive study of men, isolation and a hunter in the cold.
Crews that unravel under cold, hunger and something they can't explain
The Terror traps two ice-bound ships between starvation, scurvy and a presence the men cannot name, testing what discipline can hold together. These share that same slow unraveling: an isolated town besieged by something nobody can explain, an outpost where trust in your own crew stops being safe, this same voyage on screen, and true accounts of climbers who found how far a body can be pushed before it stops.