I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.
