Dan Simmons - Drood

This gripping Victorian thriller depicts the final days of Charles Dickens, and the extraordinary events which haunt the great writer's unfinished final novel, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. Wilkie Collins, Dickens's friend, rival, and collaborator, narrates this compelling saga, which begins when Dickens and his mistress survive a train wreck in 1865. In the aftermath of the disaster, Dickens encounters a bizarre practitioner of the black arts called Drood, who was protected from the crash because he was traveling in a coffin. Dickens pursues Drood into London's sprawling, decrepit underworld, where he develops a swelling obsession with corpses, crypts, and necromancy. Collins inevitably begins to question whether Drood really exists, or whether Dickens himself is responsible for the mysticism and murder they continually uncover. But Collins's telling of the tale is tainted by his looming jealousy of Dickens, and his considerable opium habit, so that the truth behind this twisted enigma is as elusive as the m