Drood by Dan Simmons

Drood

Has this ever happened to you? You read and read a book and then feel about halfway through that you just wasted days that you will never get back. This happened to me. I am new to this not finishing books thing. I have always been really stubborn and no matter what I was going to finish a book. Since I have been blogging I have realized that my time is precious and if a book is just not working for me I need to move on because my to-read pile is just to high.

I love books based off of classic authors. I have read a few books where the main character is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have enjoyed them except the last one I read. That was one of the few I have not finished as well. Dark water is the name of that book and you can check out my review here if you like as part of my worst of 2013. I have heard some great things about Dan Simmons and there are a few books I have been really wanting to read. This one was the only one available at my library and I was excited to start this. 

This book is about the famous author Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins who wrote the classic Woman in White. Dickens is the victim of a horrible train accident and one of the few survivors. While trying to help those he can Dickens encounters a man in a coat and top hat with a snake like nose and an accent he just can't place. As Dickens helps he notices this man named Drood going from suffering victim to victim. After he moves on those people he visited are dead. Dickens becomes obsessed with finding out more about this Drood character and begins a search that takes him and Wilkie to the darkest of dark places. It sounds really great right. 

It was really interesting at the very beginning but then the story just fell apart. The story was so disjointed and all over the place about a quarter of the way through that it was hard to keep up with. At one point we are with Dickens and Collins in a sewer like city of the dead not sure they will make it out alive and then all of a sudden it is weeks or moths later and Collins is talking about the whole thing with a former detective. It made no sense what so ever. also in the middle of what is going on Collins starts talking about Dickens's death and how his arthritis got so bad he was downing glasses of laudanum. Then it is right back to the story. I got so sick of the incoherent bouncing around that I had to just give up on this one.

Considering I didn't finish this book I will have to give it a 1 out of 5 star rating. I was half way through and it still couldn't hold my attention. Not a good one for this year. There always has to be at least one bad book in a readers life right.