I’m having a hard time writing this review.  I just finished reading this book, and I can’t quite find the right words to describe it.  It’s that good.
 
Drood is a living, breathing, twisting novel.  The best thing is that Drood goes beyond categorization, beyond a single genre.  It is enlightening, entertaining, thrilling, and beguiling.  Epic.  A sinister behemoth.
 
It has to be read, not to be understood, but to be experienced.
 
Charles Dickens survives the June 9th, 1865, Staplehurst train derailment.  While working to find fellow survivors, Dickens meets an odd man named Drood, if Drood is a man at all.  Days later, Dickens tells his friend, the writer Wilkie Collins, about the accident and the otherworldly Drood.  Obsessed with discovering the true identity, and intentions, of the almost spectral Drood, Dickens and Wilkie scour tombs, slums, crypts, and the very underground world of London itself.
 
Wilkie Collins is the narrator of the story, told from his memoirs.  He himself states that he is questionable in his reliability.  He is, afterall, fond of opium.  And Wilkie is very tired of living in the shadow of Charles Dickens, a man not afraid to offer the opinion that he is the world’s greatest writer.  Dickens often says it as fact.  As large as Dickens’s ego seems to be, he is always likable and charming.  And as bloodthirsty as Wilkie becomes, he remains just as fascinating throughout the story, even when he’s at his most dispicable.
 
Drood is a story that takes its time, and it takes time to read it.  There are twists and turns, ghostly apparitions, madmen, and monsters, but it never loses its humanity.
 
It’s excellent.
 
5 out of 5
the_novacula
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