by Dan Simmons
First published 2009
Charles Dickens walks away from a catastrophic train wreck on June 9, 1865, but something follows him from the twisted wreckage. In the valley below the broken trestle, among the dead and dying passengers, Dickens encounters something that will consume the final five years of his life. He calls it Drood. Only his friend Wilkie Collins knows the secret that drives Dickens to abandon his writing for four years. Collins watches as the famous author transforms from celebrated novelist into a man obsessed with crypts and corpses, wandering London's darkest slums by night and delivering increasingly disturbing public readings by day. Dickens calculates how long bodies take to dissolve in lime pits. He maps the city's forgotten catacombs. When he finally returns to writing, he begins what could have been his greatest mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But Drood will not let him finish it. Based on real events from Dickens's life, this story explores the psychological unraveling of a literary giant.
Genres: fiction, historical-fiction, mystery, crime, 19th-century, dark
Vibes: dark, emotional, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: literary-mystery, unreliable-narrator
Setting: London
Period: 1865
775 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company
Content warnings: death, gore, violence