Historical fiction is tough to pull off well - you can either concentrate on completely minor personages so that history nerds can't nitpick your accuracy, or you can forget accuracy and just write whatever the heck you want about whoever your subjects are. The Terror neatly avoids this dilemma and doesn't bother pretending to be a normal historical fiction, it's an intense supernatural horror story that uses Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage as a starting point for a gripping and suspenseful Lovecraftian tableau of starvation, madness, and monsters from Eskimo mythology. I read the book early in the year during a cold front, and the dark chill of the real-life winter made the scenes of ice-bound ships and desperate, starving sailors especially vivid and compelling. I was already a fan of Dan Simmons from the great first two books of his Hyperion science fiction series (the other two books, not so much), and he brings the same literary flair to this genre. You'll never look at scurvy the same way again!
