For your winter reading: Two Dan Simmons novels, reviewed by Jon Moss

It's winter--a great time to stay inside and curl up with your favorite means of staying warm, to read great books new and old. 

Here are a pair of "50-Word Reviews" by our prize-winning reviewer Jon Moss (for more of her reviews, see her blog Misty Midwest Mossiness). 

Hyperion
by Dan Simmons (3 stars)

I’m disappointed. Just when I was getting pieces of the puzzle and a few of the questions answered, the story ends. Abruptly. Hyperion is a re-imagining of the literary frame tale, similar to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but as science fiction space opera.

Seven pilgrims travel to Hyperion to petition the Shrike. Each pilgrim tells their tale in the hope  they will collectively  discover why they were chosen for the pilgrimage.  Between the tales, we eek out what’s really going on in the interstellar love triangle gone bad between the Hegemony (static humanity), the Ousters (evolved humanity) and the TechnoCore (AIs). 

(1989; won Hugo and Locus Awards in 1990)

The Terror (2007)
by Dan Simmons (4 stars)

I started reading this on a February evening, with snowfall predicted to commence after midnight. I sat shivering at the kitchen table while I read the first few chapters, even though my furnace kept my house toasty.  Brrrr..... Great writing by Dan Simmons, atmospherically speaking.

Simmons kept me riveted until the last few chapters, when he decided to take an extreme detour into arctic supernatural spirituality that left me, well, cold. Still, a great read by an outstanding author. I recommend lots of warm tea or hot cocoa and abstinence from long pork.

IMAGES: Many thanks to Wikipedia for the Hyperion cover, and to Amazon for the cover of The Terror.

KC Horror Book Club April 2014 Meeting

The Terror

By Dan Simmons

Details:
Date and Time: April 13, 2013 (Sunday) from noon to 1:30.
Location: The Green Room Burgers and Beer
Address: 4010 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite D, Kansas City, MO.
Event Notes: 

Come and discuss The Terror and grab some food too.

The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations, 126 men fight to survive with poisonous food, a dwindling supply of coal, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. With them travels an Inuit woman who cannot speak and who may be the key to survival, or the harbinger of their deaths. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear that there is no escape. The Terror swells with the heart-stopping suspense and heroic adventure that have won Dan Simmons praise as "a writer who not only makes big promises but keeps them" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). With a haunting and constantly surprising story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.

-Little, Brown and Company & Earline Beebe

Check the Facebook Event Page for more information.

Please contact Earline Beebe for more information on the Facebook event page.
Image from: SITE. Published by Little, Brown and Company.