I'm past the two-third mark on this one, and it's wonderful for reasons beyond its ultra-spooky Victorian decor. You see, the narrator of the book, Wilkie Collins, put the un- in "unreliable narrator," so half of the fun of the book is trying to figure out whether he's describing an actual event, a heavily-skewed version of a real event, or something his own brain's surprised him with after two glasses of laudanum.
So this book might be titled _Victorian Psycho_ in that it parallels Bret Easton Ellison's book in certain ways. For example, in that book, Ellis's psychopath Bateman spends pages on the most appallingly detailed descriptions of murder... but no one seems to notice his victims have gone missing, and one even reports meeting something Bateman thinks he's murdered. So one wonders if these have been nothing more than severe fantasies, fuelled by Bateman's alpha-male personality and crimson-red hatred of women.
In _Drood_, Wilkie Collins is a successful writer, but he's also smart enough to know that his success will never match that of his friend, Charles Dickens. He is consumed with jealousy over Dickens's success, but regards himself as the superior writer even though Dickens has been shepherding him through his career. When his plays fail, Collins blames Dickens's interference. When Dickens falls short of the family-man ideal, and divorces his wife by cutting her out of everything, Collins smacks his lips with nasty satisfaction... even though Collins keeps women on a string with promises of matrimony and a family life, treats his servants like garbage, and cuts them loose when they get troublesome.
And let's add Collins's drug problem. The man is knocking back two glasses of laudanum at a time, which is enough to kill a healthy man. He's had lifelong visions of ghosts, including a doppleganger of himself he calls the Other Wilkie. So he's unstable, a junkie, and a fantasist, jealous over his friends' success, casually cruel to those below his station, and pretty much a complete prick without even the charm of an antihero.
The story begins with Dickens surviving a train crash. He later tells Collins that, while tending to the victims, he encountered a caped figure flitting from victim to victim... all of whom died, while Dickens's tended to live. A nighttime visit to London's underworld, entered via crypts and catacombs, reveals this figure to be namd Drood, a nobleman's illegitimate son who's founded a criminal-Thuggee cartel in the sewers. Dickens gives Collins one version of the story, telling him that by "agreeing" to write Drood's biography, Dickens is preventing Drood from destroying the whole of London. Inspector Field, a sinister ex-policeman, tells Collins that Drood has murdered hundreds over the years, and needs him as an informant on Dickens's comings and goings. Collins isn't exactly torn over informing, since at some point he resolves that Dickens has committed murder, and that he, Collins should murder Dickens-- at the very least, to prevent him from the inevitable state funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey, final proof of Dickens's greatness and Collins's oen mediocrity.
Has Collins gone genuinely mad? Or was he, in fact, kidnapped by the Voldemort-like Drood, implanted with a mind-controlling scarab beetle, and set loose? Did Collins actually murder his servants' daughter? He writes of her murder in detail... but a few pages later, her parents receive a letter from her that Collins cannot recall forging. Has Dickens been given a scarab of his own? Are his final public performances-- capping with an intense enactment of Bill Sykes's mruder of Nancy-- a form of mesmerism? Is he doing Drood's work? Is Collins? What are these legions of ex-policemen up to?
_Drood_ is a wonderful cabinet of multithreaded literary connections. Many of the plot points and characters are echoes of the characters in Dickens' last novel, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, and Simmons also shows us where Collins drew inspiration for his own novels like _The Moonstone_. The plot itself could be one of Collins's own stories (in many ways). Collins' murderous jealousy recalls that of Salieri towards Mozart in _Amadeus_, and Collins's ego and derangement call to mind Charles Kinbote of Nabokov's _Pale Fire_. I'm tempted to read the book through a _second_ time, just to see if Simmons is trying to pull of one of Nabokov's best tricks-- to have a whole and complete story going on that the narrator is not aware of, but which we can see if we extricate ourselves from his mind... or, remove the scarab beetle the author's dropped into our brainpans.
