Drood

By Dan Simmons

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Drood is a 2009 novel by Dan Simmons, author of The Terror and Hyperion. It is built around the last five years of Charles Dickens's life and his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The narrator is the novelist Wilkie Collins, Dickens's friend and rival, whose opium addiction makes him unreliable. After surviving the 1865 Staplehurst rail crash, Dickens becomes obsessed with a sinister figure named Drood, and Collins is drawn into a dark underworld of London crypts and opium dens.

Recommended by 1 person

• Stephen King: “The last years of Charles Dickens, as narrated by his increasingly unstable colleague Wilkie Collins. This is a beautifully realized historical novel, but it’s also a modern tale that chronicles the descent of a great mind into dope-fueled madness.”