Have to add another book to my virtual library.

The Terror by Dan Simmons.

The book is a fictionalized telling of Britain's John Franklin expedition in 1845 whose purpose was to discover and map the Northwest Passage. Inthralling story. Naval version of the Donner Party in some ways. Nearly one thousand pages of amazing work considering that's a thousand pages of description of the arctic. Not an easy task. And yet, he pulls it off.

Within those 1,000 pages of frigid exposition is a shipload of doomed men who endure—until they don't—horrific experiences. The characters are so finely drawn that you get to know many as individuals. You also get to know much about boats, the Royal Navy, survival, ice, despair. It's all entwined. Including the presence of a malevolent monster who whittles away expedition members in varied gruesome ways.

I'm ordering a book on the real expedition to compare it to this historical novel. (From what I've learned so far, The Terror meshes with what's actually now known about the fate of the expedition–minus the monster, I'm guessing. (Unless one sees the monster as a metaphor.)

A fine read.