While slower-paced and less gory than some of Simmons' other horror novels (Carrion Comfort, The Terror), Drood nonetheless is a consistently interesting exploration of individual identity and dark places people are led to in order to find and assert it. While the book has Charles Dickens as a key figure, it is really Wilkie Collins (of The Moonstone fame) who is the central character. Moody, unreliable as a narrator, opium-addicted and increasingly murderous, Collins still comes across as sympathetic much of the time as he struggles to find his way out of Dickens' shadow and into the light of literary acclaim. Of course, the book is written as Collins' deathbed memoirs, years after the facts he recounts of his time with Dickens, so his memory and character are somewhat compromised. Add to this a lifetime's worth of hallucinations, and suddenly the reader is not quite sure how to view the narrator or his story.
Simmons does an excellent job of summoning Dickens' London, with all the attendant stench, human waste and degradation, and stifling heat and freezing sleet of the tenements and graveyards of the poorer quarters. It is these passages, and those that take place under the city in the crypts, opium dens, and sewers, that create the atmosphere of hopelessness that Collins descends into from his privileged life as he is drawn further into his need for narcotics and the mystery of Drood, a shadowy, near-omniscient figure with ties to ancient pagan rites. The first half of the book centers around who and what this figure is, and Simmons builds up an enticing blend of mystery and intrigue splashed with healthy quantities of blood as Dickens and Collins go slumming in order to flush out the sinister figure and break his macabre hold on their careers and imaginations. Collins hallucinations, some of which are obvious to him as such, add greatly to the eerie atmosphere, and keep the reader constantly guessing at what is real and what are simply opium dreams. The only failings in this book come in the last few hundred pages, where the mystery of Drood takes a back seat to chapter after chapter of historical details concerning the two characters' late literary careers and Collins' plot to supersede Dickens in the public's acclaim. Not that these are unwarranted or uninteresting, but the balance between horror and historical fiction, so well achieved early on in the book, becomes too polarized towards the end. All in all, however, "Drood" is an extremely intelligent and entertaining book that appeals both on an intellectual and visceral level. Frequent drug use, graphic violence to humans and animals, mildly suggestive situations, and moderately explicit language.
