A few strands of graying hair lept out from the sides of this skull-like visage.” The creature has virtually no nose, only “mere slits opening into the grub-white visage” and “small, sharp, irregular teeth, set too far apart, set into guns so pale they were whiter than the teeth themselves.”ĭickens’ last glimpse of this apparition: “The man’s pale eyes in their sunken sockets seemed to have no eyelids.

Written as Collins’ “posthumous memoir” to a “Dear Reader” centuries hence, Drood recounts Collins’ literary and personal interactions with Dickens over the last five years of the latter’s life, beginning with the Staplehurst train disaster in June 1865.ĭickens barely escapes injury and as he attempts to help others less fortunate, he encounters “a tall, thin man wearing a heavy black cape.” As Dickens later describes him, this figure “was cadaverously thin, almost shockingly pale, and stared at the writer from dark-shadowed eyes set deep under a pale, high brow that melded into a pale, bald scalp. Drood is all Wilkie Collins, and, as we are to learn only too well, Wilkie Collins is no Charles Dickens. While Simmons has taken his title from the last, and unfinished, of Dickens’ novels, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, neither the writing, the plot, nor the characters (entirely devoid of humor, every one) have much to do with Dickens’ fiction. It contains elements of the Sherlock Holmes stories (Collins as Watkins to Dickens’ Holmes), Collins’ own detective novel The Moonstone, a healthy dose of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, and even the Salieri versus Mozart plot from the movie Amadeus. Dan Simmon’s huge headstone of a book, Drood is a combination of literary biography, horror story, detective story, and memoir: the Victorian author Wilkie Collins writing about his friend Charles Dickens.

Drood simmons